


A Tincture of Sorrow

by lbswasp



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire & Related Fandoms, A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Regency, Botanical shenanigans, F/M, Fake/Pretend Relationship, Mystery, Regency-typical drug use, The hellfire club - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-08
Updated: 2020-04-18
Packaged: 2021-02-26 11:16:34
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 14
Words: 45,411
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22612369
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lbswasp/pseuds/lbswasp
Summary: Partway through her first season, debutante Lady Sansa Stark has had enough of the endless parties and balls. When Sansa hears a rumour that the reclusive Duke of Casterly is a demon, she cannot resist the challenge of proving such nonsense false. At a ball in Casterly Square she ventures across the gardens and encounters the mysterious duke — a man more interesting than any she’s found in King’s Landing society so far.Tyrion Lannister, Duke of Casterly, is well versed in rumour and ruin. He has returned home to face the rumours of scandal surrounding his parents’ deaths, which hint at everything from treason to dark sorcery. Scorning the expectations of a society that never welcomed him, he enjoys his reputation as a demonic imp — until a young woman is found dead in a circle of blood and ash at his cousin Cersei’s debutante ball.Sansa and Tyrion join forces to stop the so-called demon from killing again. Someone managed to get away with killing Tywin, the last Duke of Casterly. But they won’t kill this duke — not if Sansa has anything to say about it.(Heavily based off Lauren Willig’sThe Mark of the Midnight Manzanilla).
Relationships: Tyrion Lannister/Sansa Stark
Comments: 291
Kudos: 101





	1. The Light at the End of the Garden

**Author's Note:**

> Please enjoy my homage to fluffy, silly Regency romances, heavily based off (and owing a massive debt to) Lauren Willig's novels and featuring our favourite Westerosi couple trying to solve a mystery while forced into a fake relationship and suffering through Regency courting and manners and expectations and just...this is going to be fun, y'all.

“They say he’s a demon,” said Lady Greyjoy, Countess of Pyke, from where she and Sansa were standing on the chilly balcony overlooking the formal gardens of Lord Duskendale’s King’s Landing estate. It probably wasn’t that cold, but compared to the heat of the ballroom, the gardens felt positively Northern.

Sansa didn’t particularly care who said what. She’d made a beeline for the Braavosi doors after yet another disaster with a cad who thought she should be grateful for the little bit of attention he threw her, and she wanted out.

Out of this stifling corset, out of this damned party with its murmurs and gossips and endless ratafia, and out of the cesspool that was King’s Landing in the midst of the season.

She cursed herself for thinking she could go through with it. Oh, she’d made a splash when she’d first arrived, of course. The eldest daughter of His Grace Eddard Stark, Duke of Winterfell had come to town to make her debut, and she’d taken the city by storm. She was witty, and careful not to show her intelligence too much, tall with lovely shapely limbs, and a heart-shaped face framed with long red hair. Her tutors had ensured that her voice lacked the Northern burr of her home, she could play the pianoforte, sing and recite poetry in High Valyrian, and was without peer on the dancefloor.

She’d come to King’s Landing, a foolish little girl dreaming of pretty lights and charming knights and she’d found the world much...flatter than she’d imagined. The silks and satins looked best by candlelight, where the stains didn’t show. The glittering jewels were too often paste, and the fashionable gossip that had seemed so terribly scandalous when she’d first arrived, had faded into little more than the same tired japes being bandied about by the same tired dandies.

It didn’t help, of course, that her family was in considerable disgrace now, and that for much of her season, the gossip had been about _them_.

Her season had started so well — her coming out ball had been early in the season and was considered a resounding success by all. Sansa had found herself in the middle of the most desirable circles of the ton, with even Prince Aegon dancing with her at least three times, and she’d ridden with Lord Willas Tyrell of Highgarden in his phaeton in Baelor’s Park several times. But then everything had gone wrong.

First, Willas’ sister Margaery had come to town for her debut, then Lady Cersei Lannister had debuted, and Sansa had felt the first stirrings of trouble.

Not long after that had been her younger brother’s terrible accident, which had sent Mama racing back to Winterfell to be with him.

Then, her younger sister — _younger_ sister who was not ready to be out yet — had run off with that blacksmith boy! The scandal had nearly driven Sansa back to Winterfell herself, but Father had had an important Emancipation Bill before the House and couldn’t leave. So they’d stayed, and she’d held her head high and braved the worst of it, determined to show this pack of ninnies that Lady Sansa Stark, of the Winterfell Starks, was a lady to her bones and not one to turn tail and run at the slightest hint of trouble.

But then Father’s Bill had been soundly defeated and he’d returned to Winterfell a broken man; his quest to free all men from the shackles of slavery halted.

Sansa had begged her father to let her stay on — as much as King’s Landing had turned out to be a disappointment, at least here there was some chance of making a rich match. The amusements available at Winterstown offered no such chances — they hadn’t had a militia stop by in simply years, especially after the local assembly rooms had burned down. Fortunately, her eldest brother Robb and his new wife Roslin were staying on in King’s Landing, establishing their own house, and Sansa was able to convince Father to let her stay with them.

If Mama had still been there Sansa would never have been able to sway her, but fortunately, she was still at Winterfell and Sansa had long known how to win her father to her side.

Roslin was a sweet girl, and Sansa was thrilled that Robb had given her such a lovely new sister, but the young couple was very caught up in each other and had little time to spare for the young debutante left in their care.

Even now, in the middle of Lord Duskendale’s ball, they didn’t seem to notice their charge had crept away to a balcony, too busy laughing and twirling each other about on the crowded dance floor to have a care for anyone else.

Which suited Sansa just fine. She didn’t need anyone.

“Who?”

“The Duke of Casterly, of the house over there,” said Yara, gesturing with her glass to the end of Lord Duskendale’s gardens. “They say he’s a mythical creature of the night — a demon come to tempt women to their doom.”

“A demon? Hardly,” she said with a shake of her head. “Really, Yara.”

The other girl shrugged. “I’m just saying what’s being said. He’s a demon, or an imp, or something of the like. His family kept him chained in the attic, feeding him on the blood of virgins.”

“That’s vampires.”

“What?”

“Vampires feast on the blood of virgins,” said Sansa, who had read _The Convent of Orsino (by a Lady)_ simply because there was no one to tell her she could not. She’d thought it rather silly, and the current fad for vampires and demons rather daft. The men of Society seemed to have decided to follow one of two fashions this season — dark and gloomy, or covered in flowers in honour of Ser Percy Blakeney. It made most balls a very strange tableau. “Demons feed on…something else. Souls, I think.”

“Well then you’ll be safe — those touched by fire don’t have souls,” smirked Yara.

Sansa rolled her eyes. “Nor do squid.”

She wasn’t sure what to make of Yara, really. The other girl was tall, with a long face and straight hair — Sansa had never seen even a hint of a curl about her face, and they were the height of fashion. Yara seemed utterly bored by the entire concept of a season and disdained almost all of society’s polite manners, but was one of the few girls in King’s Landing to have her own title as well as a dowry of some £200,000. For this reason, society was determined to accept the Countess of Pyke, no matter how rude she was to them. 

It quite annoyed Sansa to see the most eligible men pass by her to throw themselves at such a plain girl, but to her credit Yara didn’t seem to notice any of them. She and Sansa had soon found each other to be a refuge from the brainless twits who simpered their way through the season, and although they weren’t what Sansa would consider friends they were...grudgingly fond of each other.

Certainly, Yara's company was infinitely preferable to that of Lady Margaery or Lady Cersei. Sansa was never sure if Lady Margaery was joking or telling the truth, and Lady Cersei was just...cruel. 

Sansa thought privately that she was more than equal to them in looks — she may not have Lady Margaery's sultry eyes or Lady Cersei's cold beauty, but her copper hair and porcelain skin was nothing to be sneered at — but even she could admit that while the Starks were an old family, they were not as rich as the Tyrells of Highgarden or the Lannisters of Casterly Rock. Once you added in her family's recent scandals it appeared that for all her good looks, charming manner and gentle breeding, society considered Lady Sansa Stark to be inferior to Lady Margaery, Lady Cersei, and the Countess of Pyke.

And it _rankled_. Her whole life, Sansa had been dreaming about taking the ton by storm, being fêted and celebrated as a darling of society, and making an advantageous match — a Marquis, a Duke, or even a Targaryen Prince! And now it all seemed to be slipping away.

“They say no one has seen him for seven years,” said Yara. “Or was it ten?”

“Just because the man scorns society doesn’t mean that he’s a creature of fire and brimstone. I’m sure he’s perfectly charming,” Sansa said.

“Prove it,” said Yara with a glint in her eye. “There’s a light on at Casterly House. Go and introduce yourself.”

Sansa Stark wasn’t one to turn down a challenge, and Yara Greyjoy knew it. It was how the incident with the chickens had come about.

Sansa _hated_ chickens.

“Well, why shouldn’t I?” said Sansa as she tugged her shawl higher on her arms. “What could possibly be more invigorating than a walk across a garden on a lovely evening?”

“Go on then,” said Yara. “I’ll just wait right here.”

Well now she had to go. The gravel crunched under her slippers as she slipped down the paths, while the evening’s cool breeze lifted the flounces of her dress and set her crimson curls dancing. The formal parterres had been cleverly arranged to provide the sense of an endless vista, but as was always the case with society, it was an illusion. This was a King’s Landing garden, after all, and Sansa was at the end of it in moments.

There was no wall separating Lord Duskendale’s garden from that of Casterly House, only a series of cyprus trees. Their spindly shapes lent almost a spooky air to the scene, but they had one major benefit — there was plenty of space between them for one slender woman to slip.

Sansa was just pleased she didn’t have to try and climb a wall, not in this dress.

Still, she hesitated. She’d never trespassed onto someone else’s property before. For one thing, she hadn’t needed to back home — her father was the largest landowner north of the Neck, and she had the right to go wherever she wanted on their lands. But also, Sansa had always been the good one. Arya had a streak of wildness in her (running away with that blacksmith boy showed that) but Sansa had always stayed on the path, always done what her mother and septa told her to do, and had never put a toe out of line.

But she couldn’t turn back now, not with Yara watching. And surely it couldn’t do any harm to just creep up to the house and peek in a window. She wished she wasn’t wearing white, but it couldn’t be helped.

_Besides,_ Sansa thought, _it’s not like I could case a scandal, not compared to my sister._

With a shrug, she plunged through the trees and staggered to a stop on the other side. The garden was shockingly overgrown with brambles and thorns, and though Sansa tried to carefully pick her way through them, her dress got snagged and tore at least twice.

Eventually however, she made it through the wilderness to an overgrown lawn, and crept towards the light she could see shining in one of the windows. Her path took her past a balcony and she started, her eyes catching movement.

There was a gargoyle on the balcony railing. Its head had turned to face her as she’d gone past it, the light of the moon shining on its grotesque face and gleaming off its pointed teeth. It opened its mouth to devour her, moving as if to fly off the balcony and swoop down to carry her to the underworld. Sansa shrieked and the world went black.


	2. The Demon Duke

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Of all the things Tyrion expected when he’d returned to King’s Landing to clear his mother’s name, a shrieking, fainting debutante in his garden was not one of them.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you to everyone who read and commented on the first chapter - I'm glad so many people like this fic 🥰
> 
> I'm away this weekend with limited internet access, so have an early chapter!
> 
> I’m changing a few things in the Lannister family tree for this fic, so if you’re confused, please check the notes at the end.

Of all the things Tyrion expected when he’d returned to King’s Landing to clear his mother’s name, a shrieking, fainting debutante in his garden was not one of them.

He’d always enjoyed the stars. One of his most prized possessions as a young boy had been his astrolabe, and he’d been chuffed to find it still in his old rooms when he’d returned to Casterly House. Frustrated and bored by the papers he’d been reviewing, his gaze had fallen on the astrolabe he’d brought down from his old rooms and he’d decided to take his port out onto the balcony and see if he could still remember how it worked.

The skies above King’s Landing were smoggier than he remembered, however, and he was out of practice in using an astrolabe to identify the stars and planets. He thought he’d just about identified Venus — _”it’s the brightest thing in the night sky other than the moon, my little lion,” his mother had told him all those years ago_ — when his stargazing was interrupted by the figure of a tall red-headed woman slipping through his garden.

Perplexed, he’d watched as she’d caught her dress on a bramble and tugged it loose with a soft curse, wondering what on earth she was doing.

He was fairly sure she wasn’t a thief, as surely no self-respecting thief would attempt to break into a house in a dress that fair glowed under the light of the full moon. _It’s a lovely dress,_ Tyrion thought. _It really shows off her…_ his thoughts trailed off as he admired the way the girl moved, the bodice of her dress showing off the gentle rise of her breasts and her porcelain skin, her copper hair shining in the moonlight and falling in curls around her face, her delicate features indicating both good breeding and a keen intelligence.

Curious to see her better, Tyrion leaned forward. Before he could hail her and ask what on earth she was doing in his garden, she spotted him, and had done the aforementioned shrieking and fainting.

Worried that she may have hurt herself, Tyrion scrambled over the balcony ledge and dropped to the ground before hurrying to her side.

“Miss? Miss!” he said, reaching out to her and then stopping. It had been a long time since he’d been among King’s Landing society, and even then he’d been all of ten and confined to the nursery whenever his parents had entertained. He wasn’t sure what was considered polite anymore — could he even touch her without compromising her? Then again, since she’d come creeping through his garden, maybe things had changed.

_Her shoulder,_ he thought._Surely touching her shoulder should be safe enough._

Reaching out again, he placed his hand on her shoulder and shook her gently. “Miss? Miss? Are you all right?”

* * *

The hand on her shoulder burned with hellish heat, and Sansa opened her eyes to see a horrific visage bearing down on her, its eyes black and burning and a terrible scar slashed across the face. Sansa screamed again and the creature reared back.

“Stop screaming!” it demanded.

“Stop looming!” Sansa yelled in return, raising her hands in a defensive gesture. _Gods I hope someone heard me scream,_ she thought, though she could still hear Lord Duskendale’s ball from here and didn’t think it likely that anyone would hear her over the music.

“I’m not looming, I’m trying to help!” it snapped, slowly reaching a hand forward. “Miss? Are you okay?”

It wasn’t a demon, Sansa realised, just a man. A dwarf. His dark blonde hair curled around his face, and now that her thoughts weren’t running away in terror, Sansa could see that he was actually rather handsome, even with the scar. His coat was of good fabric if cut in an exotic style.

Sansa felt monumentally foolish, and awfully embarrassed and wrong-footed. She didn’t like being made to feel foolish and wrong-footed, and sought to put herself on steadier ground.

“It isn’t polite to swoop on people like that,” Sansa said sharply.

“Swoop?” The man asked, looking at her incredulously. _I don’t suppose I can blame him,_ thought Sansa. “_I_ was simply enjoying my garden,” he stated.

“Your garden?” she asked, her mind spinning. _Could he be? No, surely not!_

“Yes, _my_ garden,” the dwarf confirmed, and Sansa slowly got to her feet, letting the moonlight play off the rich silver of the cameo parure that adorned her neck, ears, and brow, and made a spirited recovery.

“What are you doing addressing me when we haven’t been introduced?” She asked.

The Duke of Casterly — or at least, the man Sansa assumed must be the Duke of Casterly for she didn’t think a servant would be so quick to claim the house as their own, nor be so richly dressed — merely cocked his eyebrow at her. “I would say,” he said, his voice dropping into a purr, “that trespass was a good substitute for a formal introduction.”

The timbre of his voice made Sansa shiver, and his mouth quirked up into a fleeting smile. _He looks different when he smiles,_ Sansa thought, _though it doesn’t reach his eyes. They’re as dark and haunted as the night itself._

“I am not trespassing,” Sansa said haughtily. “I was simply admiring your foliage.”

The Duke of Casterly smiled again, another fleeting grin. “Has anyone warned you that strange plants might have thorns?”

_If I’d wanted a horticulture lesson, I’d have danced with a Tyrell,_ Sansa thought grumpily. “Has anyone ever told you that it is exceedingly annoying to speak in aphorisms?” 

“Has anyone ever told you it’s rude to answer a question with another question?” he asked, and Sansa decided that it would have to be her that would break the pattern and move the conversation onwards. 

She made a show of studying the garden around them. “Your gardener has been neglecting his duties,” she stated.

“There are gardens...and there are gardens,” he said, his voice twisting around Sansa like the slow swirl of a dark potion, conjuring up images of strange rites in midnight gardens, of night-blooming flowers and witches dancing under the full moon — a moon much like the one shining above them tonight. There was a foreign flavour to his voice, to his coat, to his eyes, which all blurred together to make him seem to be something...other.

Feeling her heart begin to race, Sansa very deliberately did not let it show how he affected her. “Your overgrowth is particularly overgrown,” she said brightly. “Have you considered a scythe?”

The duke’s heavy-lidded eyes swept from the bottom of her silver-embroidered hem all the way up to the gleaming concoction of silver, diamonds, pearls, and cameos around her neck.

At least, she assumed it was the necklace that he was looking at, and not her throat for the purposes of tearing it out and sacrificing her to the devil.

The duke stepped forward, his feet not making a sound on the overgrown path. The air in the garden suddenly felt very close, heavy with the scent of summer flowers in full bloom. “Are you volunteering to wield it?”

Sansa stumbled as she took half a step back, trying to pass it off with an airy gesture. “I toil not, nor do I scythe. But I am quite assured they are excellently effective at eradicating extraneous foliage.” 

“Perhaps,” hummed the duke, and Sansa found herself unable to look away from the eyes that were so very dark and sad in his bisected face. “And perhaps I liked my foliage just as it is.”

“Even when it obstructs your view?” Sansa asked, her voice rather more breathless that she would have liked.

“That,” said the duke, “depends on what you wish to see.”

“Or what you wish to hide?”

She couldn’t recall stepping forward, but she and the duke were close — too close. His eyes flickered down to her throat, then back up to her face.

“In that case,” said the duke, slowly reaching out to take her hand, “surely I wouldn’t tell you.”

Their gazes locked and the world around them receded to nothing. Sansa’s world began and ended with the warmth of his hand seeping through her glove, reminding her of how hot his touch had been on her skin when she’d been lying on the ground beneath him. Having now spoken to the man she knew, contrary to the rumours, that there was nothing the least bit incorporeal or demonic about the Duke of Casterly. He was just a man — albeit a man with sad, dark eyes, a fleeting smile, and a voice that made her shiver.

Sansa was fairly sure they were good shivers. She rather thought she’d like to feel their effects more.

Somewhere, not far away, a church bell tolled. The lonely knell broke over the garden once, twice, and then again, breaking the spell that held them in that dark garden together. Sansa counted twelve strikes in total. 

Midnight.

She hadn’t realised she’d spoken it aloud until the duke chuckled and said, “That is the accepted term.”

He took a step back, and Sansa mourned the loss of his hand upon hers. Feeling extremely silly to be put out at the withdrawal of something so minor as a hand, Sansa hastily rearranged the angle of her chin, aiming for maximum hauteur. She was generally quite good at hauteur. It went with her height and the size of her dowry and her station in life as the eldest daughter of the Duke of Winterfell. But tonight, under the dark gaze of the Duke of Casterly, Sansa Stark found herself at somewhat of a loss.

“Forgive me if my hospitality” — the duke gave Sansa a pointed look that made her cheeks nearly as red as her hair — “seems lacking, but I have...an appointment. Shall I escort you back to the line of shrubbery, or may I trust you to make your own way?”

“I made it here without an escort,” said Sansa tartly, before realising that that didn’t really help her case and biting her lip in embarrassment.

“I make the offer for your own protection,” said the duke smoothly, with another one of those fleeting smiles. “Against demons and dragons and things that go bump in the night.”

“Hmph,” said Sansa, in her best imitation of the Dowager Duchess of Highgarden’s famous sniff. “The question you should be asking is, who will protect them from me?”

It was an excellent parting line, and Sansa meant to use it to its full advantage. She turned on her heel with an exaggerated sweep of her demi-train. Behind her she thought she heard the duke murmur “who indeed?” as she took several steps then stopped. There was something more she needed to know before she left the man.

Turning, Sansa demanded, “Who makes appointments at midnight?”

The Duke of Casterly was standing just as she’d left him, silhouetted against the dark shadows of the overgrown garden. 

He essayed a deep bow. “Us creatures of the underworld, of course.”

* * *

Tyrion, Duke of Casterly, watched his trespasser as she stalked with great dignity as far as the border of cyprus trees — and then ruined her exit by turning back to look at him again.

Presumably to make sure he hadn’t disappeared in a flash of brimstone, presumably.

Tyrion made another bow, and the girl gave a loud and disapproving sniff as she disappeared between the twisted trees. Under the moonlight her hair had almost looked like blood, and Tyrion’s hand still felt warm from where he’d rested it upon her shoulder.

She’d been the most charming thing he’d experienced since boarding the ship that had brought him home from Braavos.

_Home_. That wasn’t a word that he’d thought applied overmuch to this place, not anymore. He’d run away so long ago after all.

He’d never fit in in King’s Landing, not really. It wasn’t only his lack of height — though that was definitely part of it — but his mother’s blood.

_Witchwoman’s brat,_ the boys at school had called him. _Demon spawn._

Tyrion’s face hardened. As amusing as that interaction had been, he wasn’t in King’s Landing to flirt with pretty girls in overgrown gardens. He had a job to do.

He turned to reenter the house, determined to finish what he’d come to King’s Landing to do. 

As he turned, his gaze caught on his mother’s greenhouse. The glass panes were cracked and blackened with soot and grime, the frame warped by the many winters it had suffered without its mistress to care for it. The broken panels gaped like a silent scream, leering like a demon’s smile.

She’d been a botanist, his mother, specialising in the plants of old Valyria, where her family had been from. She’d had the silver hair and purple eyes of her distant cousins, the Targaryens, but none of their affinity for fire, and while most of her family were at home on the waves she had been more interested in what a voyage would bring than the sea itself. 

Joanna Velaryon’s greenhouse had bloomed with exotic specimens, warmed by braziers through the bitter King’s Landing winters. Among Tyrion’s earliest memories was his mother in the greenhouses and her workroom at Casterly Rock, taking him from bloom to bloom, introducing him to each flower by name — warning him away from some, letting him crinkle and sniff others, pointing out which were from Westeros and which were from further away. The tour completed, Joanna, the Duchess of Casterly, would scribble the notes on her experiments and theories with the faintly scented red ink she favoured while Tyrion would sit at her feet and make castles out of mud, acting out the tales and songs his nurses had told him.

He still remembered the feeling of her hand gently lying on his curls, causing him to lift his head from his play, only to see her sweet smile of approval. She would stroke his head absently, her mind clearly lost in thought and her other hand spinning her quill around, flicking ink like tiny droplets of blood over her work.

She’d known so much, his mother, and she’d just started teaching him their secrets when she’d died. Although her exotic plants were her first love, she had a healthy respect for Westerosi plants and their requirements. Her Name Day gift to Tyrion that year had been a garden of his very own — and given his love of the stars, she’d helped him come up with a planting schedule that matched the graceful dance of the stars through the sky and the phases of the moon.

They’d been not even a quarter of the way through that first planting when she’d died.

No one in Tyrion’s family had been botanists, but they had been wealthy. Very wealthy. His grandfather Tytos had sponsored a scientific expedition to the ruins of old Valyria — at least, the given excuse was science, but as Tyrion had grown older and understood his family more he’d started to assume that the accompanying scientists were a cover for the plunder of the sorcery and treasure still thought to be remaining there — treasure including Brightroar, the ancestral sword of House Lannister, lost when King of the Rock Tommen II journeyed to Valyria for the exact same purpose.

Tytos had sponsored the expedition, and Tywin Lannister had been aboard to represent the family’s interests. He was well past forty, at an age when King’s Landing had despaired of seeing him married; Joanna had been barely twenty. Still, something in them had called to each other, and the journey forged them into one.

Aside from their relationship, the expedition had been a disaster — years later, Tywin would tell his young son stories of the sea serpents they’d fought off (“one of them had completely encircled the ship and was squeezing hard, trying to snap it in half, when your mother yelled like a banshee and attacked it with an axe…”), of the adventures they’d had dodging pirates within the Summer Sea and of hunting antelope on the shores of Essos, of the strange stonemen they’d fought off in Tyria, and of the sunbirds that had risen every morning and danced along the rays of the sun, raining golden feathers down upon the boat.

Tywin had also told Tyrion of what they’d found in the ruins of old Valyria — the rivers of lava flowing into the sea, and the burned shell of the city, its people entombed in rock in the motions of fleeing for their lives. How the entire ruin still stank of death and decay and sulphur, hundreds of years after the Doom had struck.

A sudden storm as they’d left Valyria had shipwrecked the boat and left Tywin and Joanna the only survivors. It had taken them nearly two years to cross Essos and get back to Westeros, and by the time they returned, Tytos had died — of a broken heart for the loss of his son, it was said — and Tywin’s younger brother Kevan had been named as Duke.

It had been a shock for him when a man claiming to be his brother had turned up, looking for all the world like a castaway (which he was) with a pregnant woman beside him — but there had been no question in the end that this was Tywin Lannister, the rightful Duke of Casterly.

After all, he was joined with his wife with one hand — and carried Brightroar with the other. And upon inspection, he had the birthmark that marked him as a Lannister, the very same as the one that would be stamped on his son’s inner thigh.

So Kevan and his new wife Dorna had given up Casterly Rock to the rightful Duke and taken a house in Lannisport, and a few years after Tyrion was born, had children of their own — the twins Jaime and Cersei.

An old man’s fancy, the wags of King’s Landing had called his mother, but Tyrion knew otherwise. His mother hadn’t been like that; his parents hadn’t been like that. He could remember them together, teasing and joking with each other, his mother inquiring after his father’s activities around the estate, his father displaying a valiant interest in his mother’s cuttings and seedlings and who had insulted whom in which learned paper. He could still remember them sitting together on a bench in the garden at Casterly Rock, his mother’s silver curls mixing with his father’s golden locks as their papers fluttered in the wind.

Tyrion looked across the garden, his eyes tracing the path his trespasser had taken not so long ago. They hadn’t gone to King’s Landing much when he was younger — it was only later, when he’d been orphaned, that he finally learned why. _Witchwoman’s brat,_ they called him, blaming his dwarfism on his mother and her “spells and potions”.

For a moment, Tyrion could see the townhouse as it had been, the few times he’d been here in King’s Landing — the statues solid on their plinths, lithe goldfish swimming in the clear water of the fountain, hedges neatly trimmed and windows blazing with light. All gone now. Gone these past ten years.

Tyrion had been only twelve when he’d lost his parents. Only twelve when he had been shunted off to school, left to stew and brood, his size preventing him from taking his anger out on the playing fields. Those hadn’t been pleasant years — he’d been numb with shock and grief, and nothing in his sheltered life had prepared him for the concentrated malice of his peers. His small size meant he couldn’t fight back, but he could hide — and he could escape.

He escaped as soon as he could, making his way across Westeros using coins pilfered from the schoolmasters and some of his worst bullies. First he headed west for Casterly Rock, and then, when Uncle Kevan had sent him back to school, he went East, to where his mother’s family lived on Driftmark. But life on Driftmark was very different from life at Casterly Rock, and Tyrion was useless upon boats. Eventually his grandfather palmed him off onto a distant relation who lived in Braavos, and that’s where Tyrion had been for seven of the last ten years, seeing the curious people and strange sights that travelled through one of the world’s greatest cities, learning a smattering of languages — the foul bits, and how to order wine — and generally experiencing the seedier side of life. 

Dear old Auntie Berthe hadn’t known what to do with a little lord, but had gathered Tyrion to her bosom, making him free of her home, showering him with sugared cakes and strong coffee, and pressing him to consider himself a sibling to his many cousins by her various husbands (Auntie Berthe had a habit of getting married to men who fathered a child or two upon her then dropped dead; yet still more turned up in their droves to court her as soon as her latest mourning period ended).

He’d even spent an enjoyable season or two performing with a comedic troupe — he’d learned some tumbling when he was very young, and he was still limber enough to do it. He’d worked with their escape artist, and his memory for poems and plays had stood him in good stead. 

It was through these performances that Tyrion had heard whispers that his parents’ deaths weren’t the accidents he’d been told they’d been — when the troupe, unknowing of his history, had cast him as the dwarf son in a tragedy about a young witch who had ensnared her husband with a lust potion then cuckolded the man with the devil, causing the devil to take his revenge on them. There were just enough details in the play, written by a playwright fresh out of Westeros, that Tyrion’s long-buried questions about his parents’ deaths had awoken. The play was about his parents, and the play blamed his mother for his parents’ deaths, linked her youth and beauty to their demise.

This would not do, and so Tyrion resigned the troupe and set sail for Westeros, determined to clear his mother’s name.

He hadn’t bothered to call on his uncle and cousins — surely Kevan was well established as the Duke of Casterly by now, and Tyrion didn’t want the title.

He just wanted the truth.

He was snapped out of his thoughts by the tread of the young man on the path behind him. 

“Your Grace?” asked Podrick, his voice squeaking and yet to settle as he held up the lantern. “You have a caller.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> While Tyrion is still the child of Tywin and Joanna Lannister, in this world he’s their only child. Cersei and Jaime are Kevan and Dorna’s children; Kevan is Tywin’s brother (as he is in canon), and the twins are Tyrion’s cousins. Clear as mud? Good.


	3. The Introduction

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "That’s the symbol of the Hellfire Club."

“A caller? At this hour?” Tyrion asked. Despite what he’d said to the girl to get her to leave, he didn’t actually have an appointment. “Did you get a name? A reason for the visit?” Tyrion pressed, but Podrick just shook his head and shrugged.

Tyrion bit back a sigh. Podrick was a good lad, loyal to a fault and built like an ox, but he didn’t talk very much. He’d been dumped on the troupe when his mother had run off with one of their actors, and the poor thing froze when pushed onto the stage the first time.

They’d wound up using him as a prop since he refused to speak or move. Tyrion had even climbed him, and pretended to be a Princess locked in a tower, much to the mirth of the audience.

But for all the troupe knew how to turn a laugh, they weren’t cruel, and once the audience had gone and they’d coaxed the still terrified boy down off the stage, Podrick was never put on the stage again. When Tyrion decided to leave for Westeros, Podrick had asked to come along. As it was the first thing Tyrion had ever heard the boy ask for (and since he still felt slightly guilty about climbing him like that), Tyrion had said yes, and had taken Podrick on as a valet.

Tyrion had no idea what a valet was meant to do, and since Casterly House was still largely shut up and lacking the staff that would usually keep such a grand manse running, Podrick was largely left to his own devices.

He seemed to have found the Tailors’ Quarters, however, as Tyrion had noticed that the cravats Podrick was tying him into now were vastly more elaborate than the ones he’d worn when he’d first arrived — and they’d only been back in King’s Landing for a few weeks. His clothes were also different — still cut in a Braavosi style, but with better fabrics. Thanks to Pod, Tyrion was running the risk of being the most fashionable man in King’s Landing — or he would be, if he ever left the house.

But he couldn’t leave yet. He needed information, leads. He’d spent the weeks since he’d arrived in King’s Landing looking through the papers his parents had left behind, hoping to find some clue, some hint as to how everything had gone wrong. How his mother came to be framed for his parents’ murders. And, of course, who killed them.

There was a tall, dark-haired man in the sitting room, his fingers dancing over the various small decorations on the mantelpiece. As Tyrion watched, the man lifted a snuffbox up and went to put it in his pocket.

“Don’t,” said Tyrion as he entered the room.

The tall man turned, his eyebrow raised, but put the snuffbox back. “Evening, your Grace,” he said in a broad northern accent. “The name’s Bronn.”

“Is that a first or a last name?” Tyrion queried as he took one of the seats before the fire, gesturing for the man to take the other.

“Only one I’ve got,” said Bronn, taking the seat and continuing to look around in interest. “I’ve heard you need someone.”

Tyrion had asked Podrick to help him find someone who could move through society, to help unravel the mystery, but he wasn’t sure this ‘Bronn’ character would be of much use. He looked like a petty thief, and hardly spoke like a noble. 

“I do,” acknowledged Tyrion. “But how do I know you’re the one who can help me?”

“You’re here to figure out who killed your family,” said Bronn, his tone even. 

Tyrion raised his eyebrows in surprise, and Bronn grinned.

“If you were here to find a wife, you’d’ve opened the House up and gone into society. Except you haven’t. You’re sitting here in the dark and the dust, refusing to see anyone. Half of society thinks you’re imaginary, and the other half thinks you’re a demon. I remember when your parents died — bit of a scandal, that. There were questions raised, and then silenced, and then you caused a bit of a flurry by running away to Essos. For such a small man you left a large amount of gossip in your wake,” Bronn concluded. “So I kept my eye out. I like a mystery.”

“I need access to society,” began Tyrion, but Bronn snorted and shook his head.

“You’re the Duke of Casterly; your access to society is confirmed the second you decide to enter it. There’ll be a ball or a drawing room or something tomorrow night — simply turn up and you’ll be in society. What you need is someone who can move through the rest of the city, and that’s where I come in.”

“The rest of the city?”

“There’s more to life than nobs, you know. Servants see everything and hear everything — yet to society, we’re just the furniture.” 

Bronn’s voice was bitter with experience when he said this, and Tyrion nodded, appreciating the man’s candor, if not his tone. “Alright then, Bronn,” said Tyrion. “I believe you will be of some help to me. What do you want in return, Bronn? Gold? Land? Women?”

Bronn grinned. “Gold can buy the other two.”

They entered into a round of bargaining, each enjoying the cut and thrust of their argument, and eventually reached a sum that both were happy with, shaking on it as Pod brought port into the room.

“Now that you are in my employ,” began Tyrion, taking a piece of paper out of his pocket and handing it over to Bronn, “what do you make of this?”

Bronn looked over the piece of paper — a paper covered in elaborate script that Tyrion couldn’t quite make out, with marks drawn in the margins. It had been tucked into his father’s diary, and it wasn’t in his father’s hand.

“I can’t read,” admitted the man, “but I know that symbol.”

He tapped the paper to signify which one he meant. “That’s the symbol of the Hellfire Club.”

* * *

Sansa swayed a little to make her skirt swish. The sweep of her train against the carpet made a most fascinating sound, and the feeling of the weight of the dress moving around her caused her great happiness. She had no idea why — the stiff, formal outfit required of court was nothing like she’d ever had to wear before — but something about it made her feel like a fairytale princess.

Skimpy, faux-Meereenese dresses might be all the rage in the streets of King’s Landing, but to gain entrance to the Red Keep, the old-fashioned hooped skirts of the previous century were de rigueur. Although the long columns of cloth that were in fashion at the moment suited Sansa well — seeing as she was mostly a long column herself — the hoops and skirts and old-fashioned ostrich feathers in her hair were fun.

Then again at Court, _anything_ to do with Southern Essos was forbidden, what with King Aerys’ favourite daughter running off with a Dothraki horse lord rather than marrying her brother Viserys as the King had wanted.

After that, it wasn’t a wise idea to talk about Southern Essos where the King could hear.

“The men do look awfully dashing with their swords, don’t they?” asked Lady Margaery, flattening her palms along her own skirts. “Though I’m surprised that His Majesty allowed them in.”

“I think you’ll find most of them are blunt,” said Sansa, looking around the crowded Drawing Room. King Aerys was on his throne, raised slightly above the milling crowd on a dias, and Sansa felt it was a shame to see him displayed as such. His hair and nails were long — too long — and even from this distance she could see signs that His Majesty was not well. His forehead was shiny with sweat, and his lips moved in a constant mumble, although no one seemed to be paying attention to him.

Lady Margaery broke into a peal of laughter. “Oh, Lady Sansa, you are so droll!” she twittered, laying a gentle hand on Sansa’s arm. “Blunt!” she giggled, and moved to better position herself to catch the eye of Prince Jon, who had just entered the room with his mother. The Prince was very handsome, Sansa allowed, and although quiet, was a good dancing companion.

And also her cousin, the Princess Lyanna being Sansa’s aunt. She’d first met Prince Jon when Aunt Lyanna had brought him to Winterfell as a child, to get to know the Stark side of his family, and he and Robb had gotten on very well. Sansa, two years younger and still in the nursery, hadn’t seen much of Jon. For a while, Sansa had had dreams about marrying Jon and becoming a Princess herself...but he was a blood relative, so it wasn’t to be. Starks didn’t do that sort of thing, even if Targaryens did.

So Sansa was willing to leave Prince Jon to Lady Margaery, though she decided to keep an eye on them. If she noticed the pretty girl making herself too much of a pest to the rather stoic and quiet Jon, Sansa would step in and rescue her cousin. In the meantime, there was Prince Aegon, Jon’s half-brother, available to romance. As he wasn’t her blood relative, he was fair game.

Spying Lady Cersei heading for Prince Aegon, Sansa decided it wasn’t a game she was willing to lose.

She started to cross the crowded floor on a path to intercept Prince Aegon before Cersei could reach her, but then Cersei stopped dead. The girl was looking at the door of the Queen’s Drawing Room with the colour draining from her face, and Sansa turned to see what was the matter.

The crowd of wide skirts and plum-coloured coats made it hard to see, but soon enough the mad whirl of the court stilled and shifted imperceptibly to the side, revealing the Duke of Casterly, wearing the plum-coloured coat and knee breeches that were required of men at court, with his hair, dark blonde in this light and neatly brushed, gleaming with hidden glints of gold. Gold glittered on the rings on his fingers and on the pommel of his sword, which even at this distance Sansa could see was in the shape of a lion’s head, with rubies set as eyes.

Something about the way the Duke held himself made Sansa quite sure that he had a live weapon strapped to his waist, not a blunt one.

“Tyrion!” cried Queen Rhaella, sweeping through the crowds. The Duke made a very handsome bow to the Queen and came up smiling. Sansa drifted closer.

“Your Majesty. I apologise for my absence.”

“And so you should,” said the Queen with a smile. “Come, greet my husband. Aerys, do you remember Tyrion?”

The King’s glassy eyes focused on Tyrion, and he shrugged. “We don’t remember no dwarf.”

Queen Rhaella laughed, but it was a forced and painful sounding thing. “He’s our cousin Joanna’s child. Remember? Joanna Velaryon?”

“She was a witch, we remember. Demon got a child upon her,” he muttered.

Queen Rhaella was clearly dismayed, while the rest of the courtiers in earshot,Sansa included, were obviously listening closely while trying to look as if they weren’t listening at all. “No, my love, that’s not what happened. Joanna married Tywin Lannister. They were in love.”

The King glared at the Duke. “Demon spawn.” 

He struggled up from his throne and left the room on unsteady legs, the Queen rushing to his side after offering a pained apology to the Duke. 

The crowd was edging away from the Duke now, leaving him clearly isolated and alone. Sansa looked for Cersei, thinking she at least would greet her cousin, but the blonde beauty was nowhere to be seen.

* * *

Well, fuck. That was not how Tyrion had thought his announcement to King’s Landing society would go. He had been hoping for a slightly warmer reception, one that would help ingratiate him into society so he could find the truth of who had murdered his mother. 

Instead he’d pissed off the King and made a spectacle of himself. _Well, you can’t undo what’s been done, old chap,_ he thought to himself. _Best press on._

He looked around, but no one would meet his eyes, and all around him he could hear whispers and sneered comments.

_All they ever do is whisper and sneer,_ he remembered his mother complaining. _Why do we have to spend time at Court? It’s a miserable place, Tywin. We don’t need to make ourselves miserable._

His mother, as always, had been right.

Which just made Tyrion more determined to clear her name. He was Tyrion Lannister, the Duke of Casterly, a cousin of the Queen. He was a Lannister. He would hold his head high, and not let any of these people look down on him. He schooled his features into one of bored superiority and made for one of the drinks tables. The King may be mad, and the Crown Prince a boring married man, but even in Braavos he’d heard of Prince Viserys’ appetites for wine, women, and horses. Surely the wine at court wouldn’t be all that terrible?

He filled a cup and took a sip, then nearly spat it back out again. 

“Awful stuff, isn’t it?” asked a soft voice from behind him. “Or at least, that’s what my brother says. Us ladies are restricted to ratafia, of course.”

Turning, Tyrion saw the girl who had invaded his garden earlier in the week. She was as beautiful in the old-fashioned garb of the court as she had been in the wispy mock-Meereenese dress she’d been shivering in in his garden. While the wide skirts made many of the women at court look as ungainly as the barges that sailed up Blackwater Rush, the girl managed to look elegant, carrying herself and her ridiculous ostrich plumes with confidence and style. It helped, of course, that he realised he could disappear entirely under her skirts and no one would ever know he was down there, and the high waist of the dress and the low cut of the bodice drew the eye to her creamy breasts that looked like they’d fall out of the dress at any moment, maybe if someone startled her by ducking under her skirts and placing his mouth on whatever bare skin he could find under there —

Tyrion hauled his thoughts back from the precipice they were teetering upon. He was no longer a comedic dwarf who was encouraged to be as lecherous as possible upon the stage. He was a Duke, damn it, and this was a high-born lady not a common strumpet. 

“I wish your warning had come sooner,” he drawled, placing the cup back on the table and trying to get himself under check. “I don’t believe we’ve been introduced. I am Casterly,” he said with a bow.

“Lady Sansa Stark, of Winterfell,” she said, dropping into curtsey that accidentally gave him a very good look at her breasts — something that would not have happened had he been taller. For once, he blessed his stature. “Is this your first time at court, your Grace?”

“Yes, my lady,” he said, raising an eyebrow slightly and seeing her nod imperceptibly in response. _Ah, so we’re not to talk about the garden,_ he assumed. “I recently arrived back from the Continent, and have taken some time to get my house into order.”

“I do hope you paid attention to getting your garden into order,” Lady Sansa said. _So we are speaking of it?_ he wondered. “It is such a shame when one gets one’s house into order yet disregards the gardens,” she continued, and Tyrion started to appreciate the cleverness this young lady clearly had.

“My mother was very fond of gardens,” Tyrion said, “and mine is very large. It will take some time to get it into order. Fortunately the days here are not too hot yet.”

“Is your garden full of flowers?” Lady Sansa asked. “I do love a garden full of flowers. It is too cold in the North to grow large gardens outside, and seeing all the lovely gardens here in the South has been wonderful. Though I do loathe the current fashion for deflowering one’s garden and replacing it with just a strip of bush.”

Tyrion’s mind boggled, his mind immediately thinking of other deflowerings and bushes, and the recent fashion amongst Braavosi whores for only having a strip of hair covering their mounds and being otherwise bare. He tried not to gape at this young woman for implying such a thing, but surely she didn’t mean it like that?

Before he could say anything, he saw a pale head of hair move behind Lady Sansa, and saw the heads of those around them bow.

“Now, Lady Sansa, if you are talking about flowers, you must know you’re the prettiest of them all, hmm?” said the man as he grabbed Lady Sansa from behind, his ungloved hands grasping at the strip of bare skin between her gloves and sleeves.

Suddenly, all the merriment and kindness that had been in Lady Sansa’s voice went away. “Your Royal Highness. How kind of you to join us. Have you met the Duke of Casterly?”

The young man peered over his shoulder and Tyrion, and from the dissipated look in the man’s eyes and the wanness of his skin deduced that this was Prince Viserys, the man whom Princess Daenerys had fled to Essos to avoid. 

“Hmm,” said the Prince as Tyrion made his bow and greeted him. “You’re quite short, aren’t you? I believe you could walk under the Lady Sansa’s skirts and come out the other side without even having to bend, couldn’t you, hmm?” he said, his lips pressed against the back of Lady Sansa’s neck and his hand sliding around to the front of her dress. “Shall we find out?” he asked, his fingers starting to pull her dress up.

Lady Sansa let out a choked squeak of protest, and Tyrion could see Viserys’ other hand tighten on her arm, his fingers digging into her soft flesh. 

“Quiet, girl!” the Prince snapped. “You don’t want to wake the dragon, do you?” he said, his fingers continuing to pull her skirt up. Tyrion could clearly see the tops of Lady Sansa’s feet, and if someone didn’t do something, soon the girl would be utterly disgraced.

Tyrion looked around, but everyone had averted their eyes. He dropped his hand to his sword — he was a terrible swordsman, and attacking a Prince in the middle of the court was tantamount to suicide, but he couldn’t just stand by and let this happen. His father had raised him to be more honourable than that.

“Release her!” snapped a voice from behind Tyrion, and everyone flinched. Viserys looked up from his perusal of Sansa’s chest and sneered, but let her dress drop from his hand.

“Why, brother, do you want her for yourself? Surely two wives are enough for any man, hmm?”

Tyrion looked behind him to see a man who could only be Crown Prince Rhaegar. He was tall, even by Targaryen standards, and a slim gold crown rested upon his neatly brushed silver hair. Behind him stood two women who could only be his wives, the Princesses Elia and Lyanna — the later of whom reached out and tugged Lady Stark to her side. _Princess Lyanna had been a Stark,_ Tyrion remembered. The gossip of Rhaegar taking a second wife had spread far and wide, and even the Braavosi had taken note. _She must be a relative of Lady Sansa._

Next to his brother, who fair shined with health and vitality, Prince Viserys looked even more pale and sickly. Tyrion looked closer, noting the deep circles under Viserys’ eyes — eyes that were dilated, his pupils little more than black dots ringed with purple. The Prince’s hair was ragged and straw-like; his skin had a yellow tinge and despite his youth there were fine lines along the side of his lips. It was a look Tyrion had seen before, now he had time to take it in and pay attention rather than panicking that he was going to draw a sword on a prince in the middle of the Palace — a look generally worn by young men, recently arrived in Braavos, who had found themselves playing too deep in the pleasures and vices of the city.

Viserys’ long, pale hands fluttered at his sides, and Tyrion was sure he spotted the sigil of the Hellfire club on one of the rings the Prince wore.

“I was just having a little fun, brother,” wheedled the Prince. “You remember fun, hmm?”

The Crown Prince looked disgusted. “Go play your games elsewhere, Viserys,” he ordered, turning and walking away, his wives ushering Lady Sansa with them.

Tyrion desperately wanted to follow them, to make sure Lady Sansa was okay, but he needed an in with the Hellfire club. And the Prince was right there. He took a deep breath, wrapped his honour in a little ball and shoved it deep down inside himself, and let the lecherous dwarf he’d played on stage come to the fore. He turned and leered at the Prince. “He took away our toy,” Tyrion pouted, and Viserys looked down at him. 

“Ah, Imp,” the Prince said. “I’ve heard stories of you. Well, if the Lady Sansa won’t play with us, we’ll just have to find someone else, won’t we?”

Tyrion bowed. “It would be an honour, your Royal Highness. I have a few things I’ve bought back from Braavos with me, that may help our...play.”

The Prince ran his tongue over his lips and grinned.


	4. The Family

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “We don’t want you here. _I_ don’t want you here. I don’t.”

A loud knocking at the door woke Tyrion, and he fumbled for his pocketwatch. It was barely noon — much earlier than Tyrion usually woke, but he’d been out with Prince Viserys until the early hours of the morning.

He still hadn’t had an invitation to the Hellfire club, but he was sure one wasn’t far away. He’d scrambled through his mother’s old notes and come up with some concoctions that were mildly hallucinogenic, which he’d passed off as his ‘toys’ from Braavos. So far, they’d been a hit, even if the Prince had pouted that Tyrion hadn’t brought any ‘fun’ toys with him. Given the Prince’s predilection for pain, humiliation and blood, Tyrion was too scared to consider what Prince Viserys considered a ‘fun’ toy.

All in all, it had been a long week since he’d been introduced to Prince Viserys, and Tyrion hadn’t risen before 1 or 2 in the afternoon in what felt like a long time.

Tyrion desperately hoped Podrick would tell whoever was at the door to go away, but there was something about the muffled voices that made him think that wasn’t going to happen. He dragged himself from bed and was muzzily belting his dressing gown closed when Podrick rapped softly on his door.

“I’m sorry, m’lord,” the boy said, “but they won’t leave until you’ve spoken to them.”

Tyrion scowled, and threw back a small glass of port, hoping it would help work the fuzz off his teeth. “Very well, I’ll be down shortly. And Pod? We’re going to need tea. Lots of tea.”

He had no idea who his guests were, but since Tyrion was awake before midday, he needed a lot of tea. He cursed King’s Landing for having insufficient access to coffee.

He wandered his way down the stairs and followed the sound of voices into one of the small drawing rooms.

Four people had come to visit: a young man with golden hair in high shirt points, an older man with his greying hair clubbed back in the old style, a matron in the finest state of modern fashion, and a young woman, a fillet of filigree shining in her gently curling golden locks.

“ — disgraceful!” the older woman was saying, and the memory slotted into place. It was his cousins, Jaime and Cersei, and their parents, Kevan and Dorna. His aunt and uncle. His father’s brother.

“Good morning,” he drawled, and all four turned to stare at him as though he was a nightmare come to life.

Cersei stared at him with eyes that were too dark for her pale face. The jewels around her neck glittered as she swallowed. “So it is true,” she said, her eyes narrowing and her voice hardening. “It is you.”

There seemed very little to say to that except, “Yes.”

“Well!” said Aunt Dorna, her stays creaking ominously beneath her red satin gown as she drew in an indignant breath. “One would have thought you might have allowed your own family to hear of your return from your own hand, rather than leaving it to the mouths of common gossips —”

“We’re delighted,” Uncle Kevan intervened, shooting his wife a hard look. A little too heartily, he said, “Welcome home, lad. Welcome home.”

“Good morning,” he greeted again, for lack of anything better to say. “I wasn’t expecting you to be in town.”

“It is your cousin’s first Season,” scolded Aunt Dorna. “Which you would have known had you shown any of the consideration due as the Head of the House.”

Tyrion could hear her pronounce the capital letters, as well as the bite of venom behind it.

“But what,” Aunt Dorna said, snapping her fan open, “can one expect?”

_From the witchwoman’s brat,_ Tyrion’s mind filled in, finishing the sentence he’d heard so many times in his youth. Aunt Dorna had always made it quite clear that she thought it a sad mistake on the part of Fate to allow Tywin to return alive from Valyria, and for the dukedom to then fall on such a miserable, misshapen creature such as Tyrion. 

_I would have thought she’d’ve been a bit more pleased when I removed myself from her world,_ Tyrion mused. _Evidently not._

“We would have invited you to escort her,” said Uncle Kevan mildly, “but we supposed you still abroad.”

The gentle reproach in Uncle Kevan’s voice was worse than the vitriol dripping from Aunt Dorna’s. Fortunately, Podrick picked that moment to enter with the tea, and Tyrion had never been as fond of the boy as he was in that moment.

His family took seats, Cersei and Aunt Dorna glowering at the amount of dust about, and the usual polite chaos that was serving tea to unexpected guests commenced.

Aunt Dorna took a sip of her tea and glared, pointedly setting the cup to the side. Cersei did the same without even deigning to sip hers, while Tyrion gulped his down and tried not to wince.

Pod had forgotten to strain it, again.

“Cersei’s ball is soon,” said Aunt Dorna, her hard eyes sweeping around the room. “It _ought_ to have been here, at Casterly House. It is the family seat here in King’s Landing, after all. And she is the jewel of the Lannister family.”

From far away, Tyrion could hear the echo of his mother’s voice, a half-remembered snippet of conversation. _”Dorna will never forgive Kevan for not being the duke,” she’d said, her voice lilting with it’s light accent. _

_“No, my love,” his father had responded as he’d gently waltzed his wife around the room to music only they could hear. “Dorna will never forgive you for being my duchess.”_

“I’m not sure the house is in any condition to hold such an event,” Tyrion demurred, his eyes on a mouse that was scurrying along the side of the room. It felt like sacrilege to invite a herd of strangers to trample through the ashes of his past. He was too busy doing that himself.

“Nonsense,” spat Aunt Dorna, her bosom swelling with indignation. “What do men know of such things? It’s no matter to have the servants soap the chandeliers and shake out the rugs. Ten days is plenty of time.”

_What servants?_ wondered Tyrion. _I’ve only got Pod._

“The cards have already gone out,” Uncle Kevan said wearily. “People have accepted. Our house is perfectly acceptable for the event.”

“Castamere House is smaller than Casterly —” began Aunt Dorna, but Cersei cut her off.

“I have no desire for a ball at Casterly House,” she sneered. 

“Beside, we’ve already had weeks of work put into the house,” said Uncle Kevan, his voice striving for evenness. “It would be daft to undo it all now and try and move everything over to here. No, Cersei’s ball will be at Castamere House. We do trust we will see you there?” 

It was more a command than a request, and Tyrion found himself nodding. “I will not fail you.”

“Haven’t you already?” muttered Aunt Dorna as she stood and shook out her skirts. “Come, Cersei.” The women swooped out of the room and Uncle Kevan made to follow them.

“It is good to see you back, boy,” he said, squeezing Tyrion’s shoulder in passing. Tyrion felt his throat work busily — of all them, it sounded like Uncle Kevan actually meant it.

The only one left was Jaime.

He and Cersei had been eight when Tyrion had left. Now he was a young man, his fine golden hair cut fashionably short, his waistcoat well-fitted and generously adorned with jangling fobs. Once upon a time, he and Tyrion had been as thick as thieves, exploring the lands around Casterly Rock on their ponies, jumping into the ocean from the ‘paws’ of the Rock, and filching tarts from the kitchen. Between Jaime’s height and charm, and Tyrion’s brains, they got themselves out of almost all the scrapes they’d ever found themselves in, and Tyrion held fond memories of his younger cousin.

Now Jaime looked at Tyrion with hurt, accusing eyes. “I didn’t believe it when they told me,” he said, his voice tight with anger.

“Believe —?”

“Believe that you’d come slinking back.” Jaime’s voice broke on the last word. He gave a bitter laugh which made him sound, to Tyrion’s ears, as very young indeed. “But then, I didn’t believe it when you left, either. Just like that. Without a word.”

_If I’d left word, they’d’ve found me, and dragged me back,_ Tyrion thought. But he couldn’t say that, not to the pain he saw in Jaime’s eyes. “I’m sorry?” he ventured instead.

“Sorry?” spat Jaime, with all the scorn of eighteen. “Sorry doesn’t mean shit. And now, I suppose, you’re going to expect to waltz in here and have everything as it was.”

Tyrion thought this was a bit unfair, given how he’d basically been hiding in a dusty house whenever he hadn’t been courting the favour of a dissipate Prince in the hope of finding a lead on his parents’ killer. But he couldn’t say that either.

In the face of Tyrion’s silence, Jaime’s voice cracked. “Well, it isn’t. It can’t be.”

“No,” said Tyrion, thinking on the cracked glasshouse and the dead plants inside. “It can’t be.”

Jaime gave Tyrion a deeply suspicious look. “Mock all you want,” he spat furiously, “but you’ll see. We don’t want you here. _I_ don’t want you here. I don’t.”

Jaime stalked from the room and slammed the door behind him so hard that Tyrion’s cup of tea toppled off the table and broke.

Tyrion looked down at where the tea was soaking into the rug and through his slippers. “I don’t want to be here either,” he said, but Jaime was long gone.

_I _don’t_ want to be here,_ Tyrion repeated to himself. _But I can’t leave yet. Not until I clear my mother’s name. And, I suppose, attend Cersei’s ball._

With a sigh, Tyrion heaved himself to his feet. He’d head back to bed. Maybe everything would look better after a bit more sleep.

* * *

Sansa sighed as she looked around the crowded ballroom. _Another boring ball,_ she thought to herself. _Another round of the same gentlemen, the same gossip, the same, the same, the same!_ Not even everyone being in costume made the ball more interesting. 

Still. Queens didn’t slouch, so Sansa drew herself up, even though she felt bare and cold in her Queen Nymeria costume. Her tunic was hardly revealing, but she felt exposed all the same. She’d chosen the costume to honour her sister — the Rhoynar Queen had been a favourite of Arya’s ever since she’d first learned about her — since today was Arya’s Name Day.

Casting her eyes across the crowd, she almost wished Arya was here. At least then something interesting would be happening.

“Are you okay, Sansa?” asked her goodsister’s voice, and for a second, Sansa hated that it was Roslin standing beside her, not her real sister. But then Sansa turned and looked at Roslin, dressed as a shepherdess with a stuffed lamb under her arm in honour of her birth family the Stokeworths, and couldn’t hold onto her anger in the face of Roslin’s gentle smile.

“Just...thinking,” said Sansa, waving her hand. “I miss Arya.”

Roslin laid her hand on Sansa’s arm. “It’s okay to miss her — to miss all of your family. I miss mine too sometimes.”

Sansa wanted to snap that it wasn’t the same — Roslin was only married, not disappeared, and she could visit her family any time. The Stokeworths only lived a day or two out of King’s Landing, not the months it would take Sansa to travel the long Kingsroad north to Winterfell to see the rest of her family. Roslin’s family hadn’t run away, hadn’t brought shame upon themselves…

But Sansa held her tongue, and smiled instead. She was fairly sure it was more of a grimace, but it would have to do. “Look! Here comes Robb,” she said, as a means of distraction.

Indeed it was Robb, carefully navigating the crowd towards them while balancing three glasses of ratafia — one in each hand, and one under his chin, adding an extra dent to his cravat and a trail of sticky liquid down his waistcoat. Sansa watched as a bit of fluff from his direwolf mask landed in that glass, and vowed to herself to do anything not to get that glass.

Fortunately, when Robb reached them, he first handed the two glasses in his hands to his wife and his sister. “Oh, I say,” he said, looking at where Yara had been standing when he’d departed to go and get the drinks, “where’s your friend?”

“Dancing,” said Sansa, gesturing to where she could see the feather in Yara’s pirate hat was gamely flapping around above the crowd. The Countess of Pyke had come as a pirate, eye patch and all, and her black leather outfit had drawn more than one raised eyebrow from the more conservative matrons of the ton. It managed to show a lot of Yara’s very tidy figure despite not revealing much of her skin, and that seemed to be enough that some of the more courageous men to overlook Yara’s height, plain looks, and general disdain for society, and ask her to dance. Sansa didn’t think Yara had missed a single dance yet tonight, whereas her dance card was distressingly empty.

Robb looked at the extraneous glass of ratafia, gave a philosophical shrug, and drained the glass himself with a shudder. “Eurgh. Awful stuff.”

“Indeed,” agreed Sansa as Roslin giggled at her husband’s expression.

Robb made an elaborate show of dabbing his mouth with a kerchief and then held his hand out to Roslin with a bow. “May I have this dance, my love?”

“You may,” said Roslin, “but we can’t leave Sansa here on her own.”

Robb looked flummoxed by this suggestion, but quickly looked around. “Varner! I say, Varner!”

A man who had been making a beeline across the ballroom flinched at Robb’s enthusiastic hail, and when Robb bellowed his name again, this time accompanied by a loud “halloo!”, gave in to the inevitable and came trotting over. 

“I say, old bean,” the man muttered at Robb, “settle down. Hardly the place for it, what?”

“Varner is a member of my club,” Robb explained as he gave the man a whack on the back in what Sansa was fairly sure was an accepted male gesture of affection but looked somewhat painful. “Cracking good fellow. Come to ask my sister to dance, have you?”

After that, the poor man could hardly say no, even though it was quite obvious it had not been his intention in the slightest.

* * *

Tyrion looked down at his feet and frowned. He felt ridiculous, pretending to totter around on cloven hooves.

But Viserys was struck with the idea of Tyrion dressing as a ‘demonic imp’ for this ball, and thus — the get up. He was still working on trying to get into Viserys’ good books, in the hope of wrangling an invitation to the Hellfire Club. He’d searched and searched throughout Casterly House and had found _nothing_ to indicate foul play. Not a single clue, or shred of evidence, or anything suspicious. Until he could leave for Casterly Rock to search there — which is where he should have started, he realised, as that was where his parents had died — he had nothing more to go on than trying to gain entrance to the Hellfire Club.

Which, given the way the other members he’d identified by their jewelry and confirmed their membership with Bronn all deferred to the spoiled prince, was solely at Viserys’ discretion.

What had started as a mild dislike of the man over his behaviour with Lady Sansa in the Drawing Room had coalesced into a firm loathing by this time, and it took all of Tyrion’s skills as an actor not to let the walking ball of human slime masquerading as a Prince of the Realm not know how offensive Tyrion found the man.

_Whether I get entrance to the Hellfire Club or not, as soon as Cersei’s ball is over I’m leaving for Casterly Rock,_ Tyrion vowed to himself as he laughed along with the rest of the Prince’s cronies as Viserys mocked a minor lordling from the Vale. Viserys seemed to be in an especially sadistic mood tonight, and Tyrion caught the tick in the Prince’s jaw that signalled the man had been drinking. _Fuck. It’s going to be a long night._

Out of the corner of his eye, a flash of red hair and white tunic caught his eye, and he watched as Lady Sansa smiled charmingly at her dance partner. _If only that was me,_ he thought, surprising himself with the strength of his wistfulness.

* * *

“You mustn’t believe everything you hear,” said Mr. Varner earnestly. 

Sansa wrenched her head around from where she’d been trying to spot the Duke of Casterly across the dance floor. It didn’t help that the Duke was so much shorter than the rest of the guests. 

_If Prince Viserys is here, he’ll be here,_ she told herself, trying to block out the memory of the Prince’s cold hands on her and his smell of dead animals and bitter fruit. She couldn’t stand the man, but for some reason the Duke was always around him. She was hoping to get him alone and convince him to stop spending time with the wastral prince. 

The Duke of Casterly was so much more interesting than anyone else she’d met here in town, and she had enjoyed all of her interactions with him so far. Which was much more than she could say about almost every other gentleman currently crowded into the ballroom. 

“I musn’t believe everything I hear about what?” she asked cautiously.

Mr. Varner smiled, his narrow face lighting up with enthusiasm. “About stoats!” Mr. Varner shook his sandy-brown head. “People have the oddest ideas about them.”

Sansa didn’t have any ideas about them at all. “I’m afraid I’ve never met a stoat,” she said, craning her head once again to try and see the Duke. Mr. Varner was a good enough dancer, even if his hand had been forced, but he wasn’t the Duke. And he kept talking about stoats.

“They don’t seem to get about much,” Mr. Varner said, seemingly genuinely bewildered by this state of affairs.

“Have you attempted popularising them as pets?” Sansa asked absently, still looking across the ballroom.

“Would you like one?” Mr. Varner asked eagerly. “I could give you Lady Nymeria.”

Mr. Varner appeared to be looking at her expectantly, and Sansa wrenched her attention back to him. “Lady Nymeria who?”

“Lady Nymeria Oblong.” When Sansa looked at him in puzzlement, Mr. Varner explained. “I thought, since your costume...she’s a lovely stoat. Very genteel, and dainty about her kills.”

Two words Sansa had never expected to hear in the same sentence. “I’m sure she’s a paragon of stoats,” she said, trying to position Mr. Varner so she could scan the ballroom over his shoulder, but Mr. Varner was lost in the joys of stoats and not picking up on Sansa’s subtle cues.

“Oh, yes, she is! You see, stoats —”

Enough was enough. Sansa stepped down hard on her own hem. “Oh, dear! Will you please excuse me, Mr. Varner? I seem to have torn the hem of my gown. Clumsy, clumsy me. I simply must make the necessary repairs.”

Sansa waggled her fingers and fled before Mr. Varner could even open his mouth to tell her that stoats, who of course did not wear gowns, would never have such a problem.

She made her way around the ballroom towards the ladies’ retiring room — she didn’t want to hurt Mr. Varner’s feelings, after all. He was a sweet man, if a bit too focused on his stoats — which coincidentally happened to be near where Prince Viserys was standing. She slowed as she neared them and the Duke came into view, looking most devilish and dashing in his costume. _He really is rather good-looking, even with the scar,_ she thought. _Especially with the scar._

She told herself that merely getting a glimpse of him was enough, and she should make her way into the retiring room, when suddenly Prince Viserys made to hand his cup to Casterly — then dropped it. When the Duke bent over to pick it up, the Prince moved like a striking viper, kicking the cup away from the Duke with a sneer. It landed at Sansa’s feet and she froze, feeling both the Prince’s and the Duke’s eyes upon her.


	5. The Masks

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> As the boat drew him across the Gods Eye, Tyrion knew he was truly in hell.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Some dialogue taken from S03E07 ‘The Bear and the Maiden Fair’ and S04E02 ‘The Lion and the Rose’, as well as some scenes from Lauren Willig’s _The Temptation of the Night Jasmine_. 
> 
> Trigger warning for medical quackery - once Pycelle appears just skip onto the next chapter.

“Bring me my cup, hmm?” said the Prince, his voice eager. Tyrion fought to keep his face level and looked at where the cup had landed — directly at Lady Sansa’s feet. She bent over to grab the cup, but the Prince barked at her to stop. Lady Sansa froze, the cup held loosely in her hand, and Tyrion walked over to her with an apologetic smile.

“I believe that’s mine, my Lady,” he said, bowing to her and gently pulling the cup from her hand. His fingers brushed her palm and the feeling of her skin sent shivers up his spine. It was like he had been drowning in a pool of dirty cooking oil, and the merest touch of her skin was like feeling fresh air upon his face. He smiled at her, in thanks, and she smiled back. It was a small, timorous thing, but a smile nonetheless. Tyrion treasured it.

He went to hand the cup back to Viserys, who simply sneered, “What good is an empty cup, hmm? Fill it.” 

Lady Sansa was between him and the closest table of food and drink, and she moved out of his way as he approached her. He passed close enough to her that he could smell the lemony scent he’d first noticed that night in his garden, but no closer. Tyrion didn’t want Viserys to see how much she affected him. It would open her up to too much pain and humiliation, and the Crown Prince wasn’t due to arrive at this ball until later. There would be no one to save her if Viserys turned his cruelty on Lady Sansa — so Tyrion had to keep the prince focused on himself. He could take the torture. Lady Sansa was too good, too kind. She didn’t deserve such pain.

He filled the cup and returned to Viserys’ side. The Prince took a sip, and spat the wine out with an oath. “It’s warm!” he sneered, and dumped the contents of the cup over Tyrion’s head.

Tyrion froze, blinking as the wine ran down his curls and over his face, covering everything in a sticky red blur. He was acutely aware of a spreading circle of silence around them, as everyone watched in horror. _Surely this is too much, even for the Mad Prince,_ thought Tyrion, but no one moved to censure the prince. Tyrion wasn’t surprised.

“Yes, that’s better, hmm,” said the Prince, and through his wine-soaked lashes Tyrion saw Viserys touch his tongue to his cup, capturing a single drop of wine, before throwing the cup to the side where it hit Lady Sansa on the thigh before falling to the floor, leaving splotches of red wine on her white gown. “You look like a proper imp now, hmm?”

Tyrion bowed, mortified, and breathed a sigh of relief when the prince let out a high pitched laugh and wandered off to find someone else to ‘play’ with.

* * *

_Oh, seven hells, that’s going to bruise,_ Sansa thought, feeling her thigh hurt from where Prince Viserys’ cup had hit her. She watched as the ton ignored the wine-soaked Duke dripping in the middle of the room, and sighed, feeling sorry for him.

“Your Grace,” she said, then trailed off. She didn’t know what to say. He looked up at her, his eyes huge and dark in his face, and felt her heart do something funny. “Come on,” she said, reaching out her hand. “Let’s go get cleaned up.”

He looked at her hand for the longest time, and just when she was about to withdraw her offer and die of shame at her forwardness, he placed his hand in hers. She felt her heart leap at his touch, and couldn’t help but smile. She gave his hand a gentle tug and he went with her, willingly, as she led him out of the ballroom in search of somewhere they could clean up.

* * *

As the boat drew him across the Gods Eye, Tyrion knew he was truly in hell.

It had been four days since he’d last seen Lady Sansa at that costume ball and therefore four days since she’d helped him wash the wine from his hair, seemingly unconcerned at the splatters of watery wine that had discoloured her own costume as they’d bent over a fountain (in full view of the ballroom, of course). 

It had felt like four years. 

Apparently enduring the public humiliation was a requirement for entry into the Hellfire Club — the next morning a card had arrived for him, offering him an immediate initiation. He’d accepted — the faster he joined the Hellfire Club, the faster he could find out why it’s symbol was in his father’s papers, and the faster he could solve the mystery of who had killed his parents.

Fast, however, didn’t seem to be in it. The road to hell may have been paved with good intentions, but it wasn’t particularly speedy — and those good intentions were surprisingly rough to travel over. They had been three days on the road from King’s Landing to the God’s Eye, and once they’d arrived at Briarwhite, notices needed to be sent out and preparations made. It wasn’t until a day later that the whole party had donned their ceremonial vestments and processed, torchbearers to the fore, from the confines of Briarwhite to the edge of the lake, where servants had begun the laborious task of rowing a party of rowdy noblemen across the vast expanse of the sulphuric lake, toxic and dead. They’d never been rowdier as they’d passed the Isle of Faces, and to Tyrion their ribaldry and merriment had seemed forced in the aura of that mystical place. _I wonder if Lady Sansa keeps the Old Gods,_ he’d wondered, then wrenched his thoughts away from her. 

His mind often strayed in her direction, thinking upon her kindness, her intelligence, her wit and her beauty, and Tyrion was honest enough with himself to realise that he was besotted with the tall Northern beauty. 

But he didn’t have time for courting, and besides — what would she want with a dwarf like him?

Still, as they passed the Isle, he couldn’t help but send a prayer to whatever god was listening that Lady Sansa was safe, and happy. And that she would continue to be safe, and happy.

When they had finally arrived at the ruins of Harrenhal, the others had gone off to prepare, leaving Tyrion cooling his heels at the base of the Kingspyre. He had been instructed to contemplate his sins with the aid of a course of “religious readings”, which turned out to be a folio of Yunkish pornography, done up at the edges with gold lead and illuminated capitals in a mockery of devotional literature.

Tyrion amused himself by flicking through it and reminiscing on some of the excellent times he’d spent with various lovers from Yunkai, but after a while, the faces of the women on every page merged into that of Lady Sansa’s, and Tyrion found himself battling his own attraction even as he shivered in the cold night air. 

The ceremonial garb he had been given was a replica of a Maester’s habit, cut out of rough brown wool, supplied with a belt of thin and flexible leather with curious metal tips. Tyrion had run them through his fingers several times before he’d realised that it was, in fact, a whip, and he’d shuddered at the thought of how it would be used on him. One of the men that had come with them was Ramsay Bolton, a close friend of Prince Viserys, and when in his cups, he would wax rhapsodic about his desire to recreate his family’s ancient sigil of the flayed man.

In addition to being drafty, the robe was extremely itchy, and so it was a tightly wound Tyrion that waited at the base of Kingspyre to be summoned, his mood swinging from being irritated at the cold to tempted with thoughts of Sansa, to being irritated at the itchiness of his robe. Tyrion knew that his sojourn at the base of the tower was meant to fill him with prickles of anticipation, but instead he just felt prickly. By the time Ser Ronnet Connington came down the stairs to collect Tyrion for his initiation, Tyrion was strongly wondering whether it was all worth it.

* * *

Sansa sneezed again, the force of it knocking her head against the wall behind her. She sniffled pathetically, and Robb fretted and paced beside her bed.

“You’re going to die. Oh gods, you’re going to die.”

“‘m not going to die, Robb,” Sansa said, her face so stuffy every word hurt. “It’s just a cold. It’ll pass.”

_If I hadn’t been pushed into that fountain,_ Sansa grumbled to herself. She’d just finished washing the wine out of the Duke’s hair and had started on her own splattered dress, trying to get the stains out before they set, when a sharp shove had come out of nowhere and knocked her sideways into the fountain. She’d looked up, coughing and spluttering, to see Lady Cersei and Prince Viserys laughing at her. Robb had hurried over and helped her out of the fountain, but the damage was done. She was drenched, and quickly caught a chill, which had in turn developed into this most annoying illness.

Robb frantically shook his head. “Roslin never should have left us alone. You’re going to die, and Mother will come from Winterfell and kill me, and Roslin will be a widow, and Mother will cut her off out of anger at your death so she’ll be out on the streets and she’ll starve!”

“Robb!” snapped Sansa. “Shut. Up. I’m not going to die. It’s just a cold. A few days of rest and I’ll be fine. And we’re not alone — you have a house full of servants, remember?”

“Yes, but who knows what cures those simple creatures will try?” said Robb with a wave of his hand.

“The same cures Old Nan fed us as children?” Sansa asked, then sneezed again.

Robb’s eyes were wide with fright. “Oh, gods, you’re right. I can’t let that happen. Not now, never again.”

“Wha-?” Robb wasn’t making any sense. “Robb, she fed us honeyed tea and made sure we were warm and well-rested.”

Robb shook his head. “Cod liver oil. Every time; cod liver oil. It’s the 1800s, Sansa! We don’t need to suffer through witchcraft anymore. I’ll summon the doctor.”

* * *

Feeling as though he had stumbled unwittingly into one of Trebor Jordayne’s Gothic novels, Tyrion followed his guide up into the Kingspyre. The stairs sloped steeply upward and were jagged and sharp, winding this way and that like a dunkard trying to find his way home. Lanterns cased in red glass hung from the walls, casting uneven light and turning the ground beneath their feet an unpleasant reddish brown, and crudely carved satyrs leered at them from the walls as they passed.

From time to time, rooms opened up off the stairs, and most of them seemed to consist of lurid wall paintings and discarded bedclothes, skulls grinning on the bedposts like macabre scarecrows.

Tyrion made a mental note to never consult Prince Viserys on matters of interior design — or Lord Slynt, who was the current holder of Harrenhal. If such a place could ever be held.

Eventually, they reached the top of the stairs, Tyrion decidedly winded and ready for this whole damn thing to be over with. His legs weren’t made for stairs like those. He’d’ve complained, but before they’d made the climb Connington had placed his finger over his lips in an unmistakable order for silence.

Before them was a set of large brass doors, featuring a bas-relief of Yunkish orgies, where tipsy women in disordered robes offered their attentions to a man, a herd of satyrs, and one another in a staggering array of wanton combinations. They were a work of art in their own right, far better executed than the paintings and carvings they’d passed on his way up the stairs. In pride of place in the middle of the doors was a knocker sculpted like a pendulous set of breasts, which Connington lifted and dropped once, twice, thrice. On the third knock the doors swung open, propelled by invisible hands — or, more likely, some combination of pulleys — and incense billowed out, sifting like mist across the lake, only scented like no mist had ever been, redolent of exotic ports and foreign temples.

For a minute, Tyrion felt like he was home in Essos again. But he wasn’t. He was in Westeros, in a freezing cold tower, in a mercilessly scratchy robe, and he was here for a reason.

Then the incense reached his eyes and Tyrion was hard pressed not to swear. Through stinging eyes, Tyrion could just barely make out the bodies in the haze, rank upon rank of them in identical robes with hoods shrouding their features and whips at their waists. With an ironically courtly gesture, Connington guided Tyrion forward into their midst and the silent brethren formed a circle around him, cutting off any means of escape.

“Initiate!” declared Viserys in thrilling tones, the hood over his face barely muffling his distinctive voice. “Do you come here of your own free will?”

“I do,” intoned Tyrion in the type of voice he’d used when playing pompous rich men on the stage.

“Do you come here of an impure heart?”

“I do.”

“Have you any sins to confess to your brothers?” 

_Ah, so that’s his game,_ Tyrion thought. _Get us to confess to our sins as part of the initiation rite, then blackmail us to keep us in line. Well it won’t work on me._ “I confess,” Tyrion declared boldly, then paused for effect. “I confess that I am sinfully eager to sample the pleasures of the evening.”

That played well with the crowd. Tyrion could hear the high pitched giggle of Bolton, the bray of Connington, and a handful of other laughs he recognised from his nights running with the prince and his circle. _Hell is empty, and all the devils are here,_ he thought, making a mental note of which laughs he could identify — and worrying that Viserys’ laugh wasn’t one of them. The only things he could make out for sure were the rings on each member’s hand — a ring set with a carved, blood-red stone.

Viserys yanked on the end of a tasseled cord, sending up a shrill clanging that reverberated through the stone chamber. “We call on the slaves of the dragon to bring us the elixir of immortality!”

* * *

“You called for me just in time,” tutted Dr. Pycelle as he looked Sansa over. He placed his hands on her chest and ordered her to cough.

She glared at Robb for bringing this doddering old man into her room, but did as he asked. Dr. Pycelle cocked his head and listened to her cough, and nodded his head.

“And do you have pain here?” asked the doctor, pressing on her abdomen, and Robb turned away with a blush.

Sansa coughed rather than answering, and Dr. Pycelle looked grave.

“It is as I thought,” he intoned. “Her womb has gone wandering. It happens often in these young girls. Too much excitement in their blood, and too much blood in her system — not enough bile. I do not recommend bleeding her in this state.”

“It’s just a chill,” Sansa said weakly, before coughing again. “A few days rest and I’ll be fine.”

Pycelle tutted again and stood to address Robb, ignoring Sansa completely. “I’ll give you something you can give her. It will stop the cough, and also stop her from having all these ideas. I’d also talk to her maid — from what I can see, her corsets haven’t been laced tight enough.” Robb blushed bright red but Pycelle doddered on without pause. “A tightly laced corset keeps the womb in the right place, and that keeps the humours in balance. Your sister is too sanguine — Pycelle’s Pure Paregoric syrup will set her right. One teaspoon, twice a day, and cut hot foods out of her diet. Dairy products and starches should be increased, and fish. Lots of fish. Keep her confined, also, until she has to be coaxed out. Then you’ll know her temperament has righted. I will call on her frequently, as well. She is likely to be a difficult patient — the sanguine ones normally are,” the doctor said as he rummaged around in his bag and withdrew a bottle and a teaspoon. 

He gave the teaspoon a cursory wipe on his waistcoat and measured out a teaspoon of the liquid. Before she could protest he had it in her mouth, and massaged her throat to make her swallow. Sansa did so, and after a few seconds gagging at the bitter taste of the stuff, felt a nascent cough blooming in her throat die down in response to the medicine. Her muscles felt heavy, yet Sansa felt like she was flying. The room seemed very far away, and when Pycelle reached out to check her pulse Sansa could barely feel his hands. She blinked at him, wondering why he was so close, but then he moved away and so did the world.

Sansa slept.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Pycelle’s Pure Paregoric syrup is based off a real product from the 1800s. Stickney and Poor's Pure Paregoric syrup had forty-six percent alcohol, one and three-sixteenth "grains of opium per ounce," and contained a dosage chart that included five-day-old infants. They were to be given five drops of the stuff, which quieted them down. Two-week-olds got eight drops. Five-year-olds got twenty-five drops. An adult got a teaspoon. I’m not sure if the stuff about the humours was still used so much in the early 1800s, but fuck it, Pycelle’s a quack.


	6. The Dragon’s Tail

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Even I’ve heard stories about what happens to those who chase the dragon.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Some dialogue from S01E09 ‘Baelor’, and several scenes from Lauren Willig’s _The Temptation of the Night Jasmine_. Also, alcohol and caffeine are the only recreational drugs I’ve ever taken, so if I have completely mangled what it’s like to be on opium or heroin, please forgive me.
> 
> TWs for very unsafe drug use, heroin, opium ,orgies, sex that is not safe sane or consensual, and drug-fueled sex.
> 
> If you’d like to avoid the drug-fueled sexual violence in this chapter, please skip from “There was nothing inside.” to “The torches in the room flickered…”

A bevvy of giggling girls in ‘slave’ outfits entered the chamber, their clothing little more than wisps of chiffon barely covering them. They moved among the men and handed out goblets of liquid, dancing back from the men’s grasping hands with squeals and laughs. 

A pretty dark-haired girl handed Tyrion his goblet, and Tyrion nodded his thanks as he lifted the liquid to his lips. _Claret, no doubt,_ Tyrion thought, _Or brandy._ His head was beginning to ache from the incense, and the giggles of the girls didn’t help. The ground was gritty and cold against his bare feet, and his robe itched something fierce. _As far as sins go, this is a fairly ramshackle attempt,_ he thought as he threw back the liquid in the cup.

_Fuck,_ he thought, looking into the cup. _That wasn’t brandy._ It had been claret, but there was something else in it. Something bitter and harsh. 

With a tingling of beads and a rush of air, the giggling girls scrambled onto a platform at the side of the room, and began to perform what Tyrion could only call a pale attempt at a Yunkish temple dance. The girls could move, but their movements had none of the suppleness and spirituality of the actual dances performed in Yunkai.

It was a rather pathetic attempt, and Tyrion felt very old and tired. One by one, the girls ranged in an obviously choreographed formation around the base of the altar, posing in forms not too dissimilar to the carved bas reliefs on the door that had led them into the room.

“Here he comes!” whispered an excited voice from the back of the room, and someone began a chant and the others took it up, intoning in unison, “So-ma, so-ma.”

It wasn’t a name Tyrion recognised, and Tyrion could tell the origins of most names. He’d read enough, and studied enough languages to be able to take a guess at almost anything he heard. _Clever nonsense, perhaps,_ he wondered, _cooked up to sound foreign?_. His head hurt too much to think about it very hard.

The low chant echoed throughout the room, whirling around and around like a dragon chasing its own tail, over and over again in an endless refrain, until the syllables blurred together and one voice was indistinguishable from the rest. Tyrion felt his own mouth move and realised he too was chanting.

Just as the chanting reached its peak, a great blast of smoke blew from the back of the altar and swirled through the room; a thick, blue-tinged smoke that carried with it a sickly sweet aftertaste that made his tongue feel thick and clung unpleasantly to the back of Tyrion’s throat. Somehow it reminded him of the doctored claret he’d drunk, and in smoke form, he knew what it was.

Into the cloud of smoke stalked a creature out of myth. 

Through the smoke, he appeared at least seven feet high. His tunic and baggy trousers were cloth of gold, sewn with bits of metal that caught and reflected the light, so he appeared to glitter with living flame. At his side hung a sword so black it seemed to drink in light and return nothing but darkness, set with rubies that glittered maliciously. A gaudy gold pectoral hung across the creature’s chest, from which dangled a massive ruby on which was etched, with a great deal more can than on the members’ rings, the insignia of the Hellfire Club.

But that wasn’t what caught Tyrion’s attention the most. Above the pectoral reared not a human head but a grotesque ritual mask, fully three feet high, in the shape of a dragon’s head. Sharp looking fangs dripping with red liquid snarled down at the watchers, and what looked like flickers of fire gleamed at the back of the dragon’s throat. But it was the eyes that were the most distressing. The areas around the eyes glittered and glimmered with ruby and gold in the firelight, but within the ovals carved out for the eyes, all was black. There was nothing inside.

The formerly still girls began to writhe at the emergence of the dragon, and with an imperious gesture the dragon stretched out his hand to one of them. She scrambled up on the stage with a cry of victory and the dragon drew a syringe from his pocket. The girl shuddered with joy upon seeing it and fell to her knees, scrambling to unbutton the dragon’s trousers. When his hard cock was revealed the girl eagerly offered her mouth, and the dragon grabbed her hair with his empty hand and shoved his hard cock deep in her mouth, using her while the rest of the girls chanted along with the men, their eyes fixed on the syringe still held in his other hand. Either the girl was very good with her mouth or the dragon was right on the edge, for he spilled himself after a handful of thrusts with a roar, and the girl fell back with a gasp, the dragon’s come dripping from her mouth. She held her hand up in supplication and the dragon bent down and plunged the needle of the syringe into her arm.

The girl howled as the drugs took hold, her eyes rolling back and the dragon’s cum still dripping from her mouth. Leaving the needle in her arm, the dragon reached down and tore the girl’s skirts off with his hand, baring her cunt to the room, and roared for the orgy to begin.

A girl was pushed in his direction and Tyrion stumbled, his head colliding with her stomach. He looked up and saw dark eyes and soft dark curls, and noticing that some of the other men were leading girls into the private rooms, did the same with this girl.

Once the door was closed behind them the girl pounced, knocking him to the ground. She grinned, and reached for the tie of his breeches, but Tyrion stilled her hand. He looked deep into her eyes, and could see that her pupils were completely blown out. _She’s out of her fucking mind,_ he thought, and a dark voice at the back of his head wondered why this was a bad thing. 

The torches in the room flickered and for a second Tyrion didn’t see this woman with dark eyes and hair, but rather a different woman — one with curls the colour of fire, and eyes as blue as the summer sky. For a second, he didn’t feel the practised hands of a whore pulling at his clothes but the gentle touch of a kind woman washing wine from his hair.

“No, stop,” Tyrion said, gently pushing the girl back. “This isn’t what I want. You’re not who I want,” he admitted, mostly to himself.

“Who would you like me to be?” she purred, her accent marking her as Lorathi. She reclined back on the musty bedclothes strewn across the floor, and slid her hands down her frame, flicking her split skirts open so Tyrion could see how wet and willing she was. Tyrion shuddered and dropped his head to his hands.

The girl cocked her head to the side. “Oh, is it like that?” she asked, and flipped herself over, baring her buttocks. “Is this better? Or should I call one of the men in here, to get you started? Some of them do like to share, you know.”

Tyrion did know. He’d seen more than one of the men grab another man and tow him into the shadows tonight — shadows where no woman was waiting.

“No, that’s not it,” he croaked as his eyes refused to move from her bare, creamy skin. He wondered how Sansa would look in such a position, and gulped, his mind only too ready to conjure up how she would look stretched out on the crimson sheets of his bed, her eyes clouded with lust instead of drugs, and Tyrion felt his heart shudder with want.

The girl turned again, sitting back on her heels, and cocked her head to the side with a considering look. “You really don’t want anything?” she asked.

Tyrion shook his head. “Who I want isn’t here,” he said softly. 

The girl nodded, took her dress off, and left the room. Tyrion barely had time to wonder where she had gone before she was back carrying a tray. The girl knelt and Tyrion could see that she’d brought in a Yi Tish opium tray holding two pipes, an opium lamp, spare pipe-bowls, and other implements. He’d seen such arrangements before, in Braavos.

He’d also seen what opium did to a man. When the girl offered him one of the pipes, Tyrion shook his head. He moved to the walls of the room and opened the window just a fraction — enough to let some of the cold night air in. His head started to clear as he watched the woman methodically pack the pipe, vaporise the opium over the lamp, and inhale a long pull.

“Who do you want?” the girl asked.

“A girl,” Tyrion responded, not wanting to darken Sansa’s name by speaking it in a place such as this. “A girl who is far away from here.”

The girl nodded. “Don’t we all wish we were far away from here?” 

“Where would you rather be?” he asked.

“I would be dancing”, said the girl, her hands tracing shapes in the air. “Dancing on the stages of Braavos, like Marie Taglioni. So light, light, light, like I could just float away. Away from here, away from all of this.”

Tyrion studied the girl as his brain cleared. He could see now that she did have a dancers build — but her muscles were wasted from drug use, and if she didn’t have some form of pox, Tyrion would be amazed. “I saw her dance once,” he offered into the silence. “In Zéphire et Flore.”

The girl rolled onto her side, her eyes wide with both the drugs and with fascination. “What was she like?”

Tyrion smiled at the memory. “She was lighter than air. It was the most amazing thing I ever saw.”

_Well, it had been,_ a small corner of his brain piped up. _But you’ve seen better now, haven’t you?_ His brain provided images of Sansa then, her eyes alight with joy, her hair spilling down her neck, and as her brother pulled her out of the fountain the last time Tyrion saw her, her soaked dress clinging to her every curve and fueling nights of fantasies since.

“I heard some of her fans ate her shoes once,” the girl said, her voice and body all begging for the story.

Tyrion laughed. “I heard that story too. How Marie left her shoes in her hotel room, and a group of fans banded together and bought them for a thousand gold pieces. They were served fricassee — the slippers sliced, braised and sauteed, then served in a white sauce. It was all washed down with bumpers of champagne.”

“So it really happened?” asked the girl.

“No,” said Tyrion with a shake of his head. “I mean, they ate the slippers, but they weren’t Marie’s. The hotelier’s daughter was a dancer — it was a pair of her shoes, not Marie’s.”

“But you saw her dance? You really saw her dance?”

Tyrion nodded, and the girl scrambled to her knees and across to Tyrion, nearly knocking the opium lamp over as she did so.

“I’m Shae. Tell. Me. Everything.”

* * *

Cersei Lannister’s ball was everything a girl could ever want. The girl herself was dressed head to toe in cloth of gold, the dress emphasising her tiny waist and her creamy shoulders, as her perfectly curled ringlets tumbled winsomely down her back. Suitors swirled around her, dancing with her, bringing her drinks and nibbles between dances, and generally surrounding her with a crowd of adoration at all times. Cersei was lapping it up, like a cat encircled by bowls of the freshest cream.

Standing in a corset that was laced much tighter than she was used to, Sansa felt almost envious of the other girl. She looked like she was having fun. _She looks like she can breathe,_ Sansa grumped to herself. 

Roslin had returned from her trip to visit her cousin a few days ago, and while she’d been horrified at the syrup Dr. Pycelle had prescribed Sansa (“one and three-sixteenth grains of opium per ounce? Absurd!”) and had immediately poured it down the drain, Roslin had agreed that Sansa’s corsets were being laced too loose. 

Which is why Sansa now creaked with every breath she tried to take, and ached all over with a sore head that stubbornly would not go away.

Movement near one of the doors caught Sansa’s eye, and what she saw caused a tingle of anticipation to run up her spine like bubbles up the side of a champagne glass. She stood straighter and held her head higher as the men of the Lannister family — Lord Kevan, Ser Jaime and the Duke — entered the room. 

Sansa released her pent-up breath in as long a sigh as she could given the tightness of her waist, and realised that a dozen others were doing so as well. But while they had their eyes on the dashing Ser Jaime, Sansa only had eyes for the Duke. Who refused to join in the merriment, and instead lurked at the back of the room, doing his best to look brooding and mysterious, or as brooding and mysterious as one could in a well-lit ballroom with footmen pestering people constantly with flutes of champagne. Occasionally, one of the more disreputable rakes of the ton would stop and speak to him, but the Duke just waved them on and took another glass of champagne.

Sansa could say one thing for the Lannisters, and that was that their drinks and their catering were divine. She’d already had so many lemon cakes she could feel her stays creak at the thought of having more, and not for the first time tonight she cursed Dr. Pycelle and Robb and Roslin. She wondered if she could sneak off and loosen her corset, just a little, but she wasn’t sure if her dress would still fit if she did. 

She realised she needed something to distract her from her discomfort. A project. And what better project than a sulking Duke? _He’s been out of society for a long time,_ she thought to herself. _He’s in dire need of a little friendly advice — and who better than myself to deliver it? Really, Sansa, it would be a kindness to the poor man. And he is such an entertaining conversationalist. And his hair did feel so nice when you helped him with it at that costume ball._ Consorting with a duke would be a shot across the brow to some of the other debutantes, but Sansa tried very hard not to think too hard about that. It would be unseemly to gloat.

* * *

“Hello,” said the vision.

Except, when Tyrion peered up from his glass, he saw it wasn’t a vision, or a dream. Lady Sansa was really standing in front of him, addressing him. He swept into a bow, and tried very hard not to throw up on her shoes. The Hellfire Club had relocated from Harrenhal to King’s Landing and their revels continued in the city, and although Tyrion refrained from smoking opium directly he’d inhaled enough of it from the smoke in the rooms that he was feeling it’s effects. Fortunately, the girls of Harrenhal had come with them, and Tyrion was able to continue his time with Shae — who was happy to smoke her opium and chat with him until she fell asleep, leaving him to his melancholy and his thoughts. 

Last night they’d been partying in Viserys’ town house, and Tyrion had taken the time to search what he could of the house. He’d spent the early hours of the morning trying every hiding place he could think of — even the hollow globe in Viserys’ office, in which he’d found some _very_ interesting letters — and between the lingering effects of the opium-laced smoke and the sleepless night, he’d never felt less like attending a ball.

However, it was Cersei’s ball, and he’d promised his aunt and uncle, so here he was, propping up a wall and praying for death.

Death had not come to him, but an angel had. “Oh,” he said, his brain moving sluggishly and his lips following suit. “It’s you.”

Under the dizzying light of a hundred candles her hair blazed as red as a sunset, and her eyes were the blue of a mountain lake. Her cream dress enhanced the delicate porcelain of her skin, and he’d never seen anything as beautiful.

She leaned in close. “Are you quite all right?”

“All right?” The idea was so foreign that Tyrion didn’t know what to say. He tamped down on his laughter right before it could leave his throat, and he coughed instead.

“Let me be more specific,” said the Lady Sansa, cocking her head. “Are you about to swoon? Because, if so, I should like to step out of the way.”

“Am I about to — Seven Hells, no!”

“Well, you were looking more than a little wobbly,” said Lady Sansa kindly. “Should you have a need for it, I have a vinaigrette in my reticule.”

“I assure you, I have no need for a vinaigrette,” Tyrion said with some asperity. “If I were to be…_wobbly_...any wobbliness is purely a wobbliness of the spirit.”

“Would your spirit like some of my vinaigrette, then? Because you do seem to need something,” she responded tartly, and despite the pain in his head Tyrion couldn’t help but smile.

“Your concern does you credit, my Lady, but I can assure you that your tender ministrations are entirely unnecessary.”

“I never minister unnecessarily,” said Lady Sansa pertly. “That would be a waste of your time and mine. No, your Grace, it is simply that you look like death.”

“Oh, gods, not that again,” he groaned. “Didn’t we sort the question of me being a creature of the night in a previous conversation?”

Lady Sansa giggled at his frustration. “What I meant is that you look a bit like you just staggered up from a prolonged illness while still in the weak-tea-and-porridge phase.”

It was a rather vivid image, and Tyrion couldn’t help but picture Lady Sansa being the one to bring him his weak tea and porridge. And maybe a kiss on his brow for luck. “I’m not sure that’s an improvement.”

“No,” agreed Lady Sansa. “If you tasted my goodsister’s porridge you would agree that death was by far the better option. At least death probably doesn’t taste like _glue_.”

Caught by the asperity and the humour in her words Tyrion was startled into laughter. It was a little rusty, but a laugh all the same. “I won’t ask how you know what glue tastes like, my lady.”

“Wise,” she said with a regal nod, before looking him over with evident satisfaction. “That’s better. You look quite different when you smile, you know. Much less otherworldly.”

Tyrion groaned. “Are you trying to...jolly me?”

Lady Sansa didn’t seem the least bit offended by his accusation. “Someone needs to. Otherwise those vultures,” she gestured back towards the crowds, “will just go on speculating about your nocturnal habits.”

“There’s been speculation, has there?”

Lady Sansa shrugged. “A Duke, come back to King’s Landing, with a mysterious past? Of course there’s speculation. Speculation and gossip is all most of society is good for, really. If they stopped talking I’m sure most of the walls of the ballrooms would fall in. Though, if I may…”

He cocked an eyebrow at her, and Lady Sansa paused, clearly thinking through what to say with deliberation and care.

“Prince Viserys and his crowd. They...they aren’t the best crowd to run with, not if you want to avoid speculation.”

“Lady Sansa…”

“I can’t tell you what to do, I know,” she said hurriedly. “You’re a grown man, you have every right to enjoy whatever company you desire. Just...if I may...watch yourself there. I’ve only been in King’s Landing for a few months but even I’ve heard enough stories about what happens to those who chase the dragon.”

Tyrion started. How did a lady so gentle as Sansa know such a term for opium use? “My lady?” he asked.

“Chase the dragon? You know, because Viserys is a Targaryen? He likes to talk about himself as a dragon, haven’t you noticed? I’ve noticed,” she said with a shudder, and suddenly all Tyrion could see were Viserys’ hands on Sansa’s skin, the prince pawing at her skirts, and the clear terror her eyes had been unable to hide. His loathing for the prince erupted through his soul once again, and the only thing that stopped him from immediately challenging the prince to a duel was the desire to find his mother’s killer.

And the fact he’d probably lose any duel with the prince. His reach with a sword was too short, and he was a terrible shot with dueling pistols.

“Thank you, my lady,” he said, after the silence had grown too long and Lady Sansa had started to look too concerned. “I will take your words under advisement. Now, I believe —”

He staggered as someone bumped against him, hard enough to make him stumble.

Lady Sansa grabbed his arms and stopped him from crashing into her. “If you’re going to swoon —”

“_I am not going to swoon!_” At least three people standing near them turned their heads to stare, and Tyrion lowered his voice. “I wish you’d stop saying that. Someone bumped into me, that’s all.”

He turned his head to look, but no one was there. There was, however, a folded piece of paper on the floor at his feet. Written on the side, in bold black lettering, was simply **Casterly**.


	7. The Balcony

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “The south balcony? At midnight?” Lady Sansa peered shamelessly over his arm. “How trite. Really, people have no imagination these days.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I hope everyone is staying safe and well! Remember, wash your hands and don't be racist <3

They both stared at the note.

“I think that’s for you,” Lady Sansa said helpfully, and Tyrion scooped it up before she could reach for it.

The cream-coloured paper was heavy, of good quality, the ink a rich black — but the handwriting was as shaky as if the author had penned it in the throes of ague, on a ship, in a strong wind.

**I know something you will wish to know. Meet me on the south balcony at midnight.**

There was no signature. Tyrion glanced behind him, but it was too late — there was no one nearby, and those who had been watching him looked away hurriedly. Short of checking the fingers of all the partygoers for ink, he had no way of telling who had dropped the note.

_Something you will wish to know…_ He hadn’t advertised why he was back in King’s Landing, but someone could have gotten wind of the inquiries he’d had Bronn making. 

Or simply wanted to try and blackmail him, since he hadn’t given up any secrets when he’d been initiated into the Hellfire Club. His mind briefly turned over the options — perhaps he was being lured somewhere, so he could be caught in the midst of a scandal; so he could be blackmailed. 

Perhaps he was a pawn in someone else’s game. _But whose?_ he wondered.

“The south balcony? At midnight?” Lady Sansa peered shamelessly over his arm. “How trite. Really, people have no imagination these days.”

Tyrion crumpled the note in the hand, his emotions swinging between irritation, anticipation, and fear. “First my garden, and now my correspondence. Haven’t you heard of the term ‘privacy’, Lady Sansa?”

“Well, if you will leave things lying about…”

“My garden was hardly left lying about,” he snapped, and the smile that had been playing at the edges of Lady Sansa’s mouth crumpled.

“It’s nearly midnight,” she said softly. It was, if the ornate clock on the mantel was correct, ten minutes to midnight. And she was right — midnight was a rather hackneyed time for an assignation.

“It’s probably a thrill-seeker who wishes to be able to brag that they spent a few minutes alone in the company of a demon,” he offered, hoping to coax a smile onto Lady Sansa’s face again.

She nibbled on her lower lip. “Or maybe…” she trailed off, and he gave her an encouraging nod. Causing her smile to dim had been like kicking a puppy. “Maybe it’s a coronet seeker who wishes to be able to claim that she spent a few moments alone with a duke. You have no idea — _no idea_ — the lengths, or the heights, that some women will go to,” she said with a smile. “Lollys Stokeworth — no relation to my goodsister — once scaled a wall in an attempt to ensnare a marquess.”

“A wall,” Tyrion stated sceptically.

“It wasn’t a very tall wall, really. More of a fence. But still, I’m sure you’ll agree that the principle remains the same. And a duke,” she said with a nod, “is very much higher than a marquess. It’s a wonder no one’s tried to get you alone before now, come to think of it. A handsome duke such as yourself should have been fighting them off with a stick.”

“I hardly think —” he began, then her words caught up with him. “You think I’m handsome?”

She stuttered and blushed. “Oh, well, of course! You have lovely features — very balanced and symmetrical. And such kind eyes.”

Lady Sansa was as red as a tomato and Tyrion decided to put her out of her misery. “I thank you, Lady Sansa. You are most handsome as well. But really, I am not so much of a catch, what with my...height.”

“Nonsense,” she said firmly. “You’re kind, and funny, and clever. Other than your perhaps unfortunate choice of companions in Prince Viserys and his lot, there is absolutely nothing that would discount you from being fine marriage material.”

“Yet I am not surrounded by debutantes,” he said, “other than...you.” He arched his brow at Lady Sansa, who was looking down at her shoes with a blush. “Could it be that no one else is tilting at me because you have already staked your claim?”

“I have staked no claim,” Sansa said firmly. “You just happen to be the most interesting person here. And, in the interests of fairness, I really must tell you that it is now even nearer to midnight, and we are still a long way from the south balcony.”

“We?”

“You don’t think I’d let you go alone, do you?” Lady Sansa asked, determination filling her gaze as she turned and began to walk in the direction that Tyrion assumed led to the south balcony. “If it is an unscrupulous lady, I can advise you to withdraw before engaging with her, and thus you won’t be compromised.”

“But won’t you be compromised? Aren’t there rules about young ladies on balconies?”

Lady Sansa looked over her shoulder, one long crimson curl bouncing against her chest and causing Tyrion to viscerally imagine what such a curl would look like bouncing against his bed. He clamped down on his attraction as Lady Sansa spoke. “It’s all right as long as we’re in sight of the ballroom,” she said in such a nonchalant tone that Tyrion was sure she was lying. “Besides, my chaperone is right over there.”

She waved into the crowd but he couldn’t make out anyone she could be referring to. 

“I think it would be best if you stopped wasting time with me. Don’t you have an assignation to keep?” Lady Sansa asked as she held open the door to the balcony.

“Assignations are generally better kept alone,” said Tyrion repressively, although at this point he had to admit that he would be rather disappointed if Lady Sansa were to decamp. He did like talking to her, and she was right — he didn’t know enough about most of Society, not like she did. If there was anything nefarious afoot, he trusted she would warn him.

And besides, she was the daughter of the Duke of Winterfell, a man so honourable that even in Braavos they told stories about his honour and justness. Surely the words of the oldest daughter of such a man would be treated with the utmost respect if any tricky situations were to occur.

“Pooh,” said Lady Sansa, and preceded him through the doors, letting them swing back in his face.

Cursing under his breath, Tyrion caught up with her just past a large Qartheen urn. “Why are you so eager to leave the ballroom anyway?” he asked. _Turn and turn about is fair play,_ he thought. “Don’t tell me it’s all altruistic interest in my humble affairs.”

“Of course not,” saud Lady Sansa, entirely unruffled as she surveyed the garden. “Your affairs would never be humble. Now, then, if you had instigated an assignation, where would you wait?”

Lady Sansa paused halfway down the balcony. On either side of her, red and gold roses bloomed improbably in marble urns, hothouse flowers transplanted for the evening to enliven the unremitting grey of Uncle Kevan’s balcony. The flowers were already beginning to droop and fall, scattering their petals like drops of blood among golden coins.

_Fitting for my family, really,_ Tyrion thought absently as he watched Lady Sansa’s skirts brush away the petals as she moved gracefully down the balcony. Watching the train of her skirt moving was definitely safer than watching how her body moved in her dress, that was for sure.

The urns of flowers stretched out at regular intervals along the balcony into infinity, punctuated at intervals by marble benches, the sides of which were curled and scrolled. They looked, thought Tyrion, distinctly uncomfortable.

There was no sign of life on the balcony, and Tyrion wondered if it were all a ruse.

“There!” said Lady Sansa, reaching back to tug Tyrion up beside her. “Don’t you see? She’s sitting on that bench, waiting for you.”

She pointed all the way down to the far end of the balcony, far away from the reflected light of the ballroom windows. Among the shadows, Tyrion caught a hint of white.

Cautiously, he approached, thinking at first it might merely be someone’s discarded wrap, but no. Lady Sansa was correct — as they approached, Tyrion saw a foot dangling beneath the fabric, a small foot in an impractical satin slipper, stained with something dark. Around the woman, on the ground, was more darkness. It appeared to form a circle.

Tyrion’s footsteps were heavy against the flagstones, Lady Sansa’s a lighter counterpoint; yet the woman made no move to rise.

“I don’t recognise her,” Lady Sansa said, puzzlement evident in her tone. “I’ll just wait here. In case you need me.”

He was reluctant to leave her, but he nodded and moved forward anyway. “Hello?” Tyrion called tentatively, but the woman still didn’t stir. She appeared to have fallen asleep, lying on the hard marble bench as if it were upholstered in the softest of velvet, her diaphanous skirts falling gracefully around her legs. Her head had fallen back a little against the scrolled arm of the bench, her long silver hair partly obscuring her face.

In her lightly clasped hands rested a straggling bouquet of pale daisies. The ground around her was discoloured somehow, and Tyrion felt the first stirrings of dread unfurl within him.

Tyrion took another step forward, his footfall echoing in his ears, but he’d seen enough. He knew the woman wouldn’t stir. He didn’t need to hold a mirror to those lips to know that there was no breath between them, but he held out a hand all the same. Just in case.

“What is it?” There was a series of light footfalls on the flagstones as Lady Sansa came up behind him. “Why are you — oh.”

In the silence, Tyrion could hear the rustle of fabric as Lady Sansa’s chest rose and fell, and a small, damp noise as she gulped. Hard. “Is that...Is she…”

“Yes,” said Tyrion, answering both questions at once.

The dead woman’s skin was a clear, pale white — all the better to show off the strange markings drawn in blood on her skin. Markings repeated in blood and ash in a circle around the marble bench.

* * *

Sansa’s throat closed up as she stared at the woman on the marble bench, her flowing skirt arranged so carefully around her. So still. So peaceful, if you ignored the markings.

So dead. She had never seen a dead person before. Her grandparents had died when she was very little and she couldn’t remember if she’d ever seen their corpses.

Bodies.

When was a body a corpse?

There was bile at the back of Sansa’s throat and a ringing in her ears; her hands felt cold and damp, but she didn’t look away. Couldn’t look away. All she could see was the pale hair, the blood, the ash…

A hand on her wrist startled her. “Where’s that vinaigrette?” the Duke asked sharply.

Sansa huffed out a breath. “I’m not swooning.” She wasn’t, not really. The world had just gone...sideways for a moment. “I just...I just tripped on my hem.”

The Duke looked sceptical, seeing as how she hadn’t been moving at all, but he held his tongue and removed his hand from her wrist.

She wished he hadn’t done that. His hand was warm, firm — reassuring. The world felt a colder, emptier place without his touch. Sansa swallowed, hard.

“I should get you inside,” said the Duke.

Sansa drew herself up. “No. No, I’m quite alright. Really.”

She wasn’t going to swoon, not in front of the Duke. She could feel her nails making sharp half circles in her palms and forced herself to relax her hands, finger by finger.

_You pride yourself on having a cool head in a crisis,_ she told herself firmly. Don’t lose it now. But then, her former experiences of crises had been limited to propping up falling scenery in amateur theatricals in Winterstown, and dealing with the fall out of Arya’s elopement. For all that she liked to think of herself as a woman of the world, Sansa was coming face to face with the reality that she really lived a rather sheltered existence.

“Daisies,” Sansa said, trying to force her thoughts onto something more somber than her own naivety. “She’s holding daisies.”

Someone had placed flowers in the woman’s hands. It wasn’t an elegant bouquet, but full of uneven stems bound untidily in a gold and silver ribbon. For a moment, Sansa thought she recognised the ribbon, but then, this was King’s Landing. There were a lot of ribbons around. She’d lost count of how many she herself owned.

“Those aren’t daisies,” the Duke said.

_They are too!_ Sansa thought. _They’re simple white flowers, with a big yellow dot in the middle! That’s a daisy!_ But something about the Duke’s expression, his certainty, caused her to hold her tongue. 

“Who is she?” Sansa asked as the Duke frowned and crouched down. Sansa tried to look over his head but couldn’t see what he was doing; suddenly he stood up and Sansa was sure he tucked something in his pocket as he did so.

“There’s something familiar about her,” he said with a frown. “Her hair, her face…”

“Her hair is very pretty,” Sansa said. “Like a Targaryen.”

The Duke went white. “Oh,” he said, a soft gasp. “Oh, of course.”

“Of course what?” Sansa demanded.

“Velaryons also have hair this pale. My mother was a Velaryon.” The Duke smiled — or at least bared his teeth. “Don’t you know? I come from a cursed race.”

Sansa rolled her eyes at him. “You’re not cursed,” she said firmly. “And no matter what’s been painted on her, I don’t believe that to be a curse either. I don’t believe in curses, or any of that supernatural nonsense.”

“Then what do you believe in?” The Duke’s voice was low and rasping, and it sent shivers up Sansa’s spine.

Shivers she very firmly shook off. “Malignant human agency,” she said firmly, and had the satisfaction of seeing the Duke blink. “That’s what I believe in. It wasn’t a curse, or demons, that killed this poor woman. It was a person, plain and simple. The question is — who? Either she summoned you here herself, which seems unlikely given her...yes, well,” Sansa coughed, “or someone meant for you to find her.”

“Are you accusing me?”

“No, but I think someone was planning to. What’s that in your hand?”

“My hand?” The Duke tried to look innocent but failed marvelously.

“Yes, your hand. I saw you pick something up. No, don’t try to hide it, I have brothers. What is it?”

With a sigh, he withdrew his hand from his pocket. “A snuff box. It was under the bench.”

Quick as a flash, Sansa grabbed it and turned so she could see it better in the light spilling from the ballroom windows. “A snuff box, with a roaring golden lion on it.”

His hand still outstretched from where she’d grabbed the snuff box from, the Duke said stiffly, “If you would return that to me —”

“So it is yours.”

“I don’t take snuff,” he said curtly. “May I have that, please?”

“Why, if it’s not yours?”

“Because I don’t want anyone else to find it!” he snapped. “Because even though it’s not mine-mine, it is my family’s, and it’s awfully bloody suspicious to find it under the skirts of a dead woman!”

Sansa felt herself rear back at his outburst, and he looked embarrassed when he realised how emotive he was being.

“My lady, I apologise, but it has been a trying night.”

“You don’t say,” Sansa said softly as she handed the box back. “We should go and find someone to report her to, I suppose. A City Guard or somesuch.”

The Duke opened the snuff box, but there was nothing inside it. He stilled when looking at the inside of it’s lid then closed it, and tapped it against his lips. “No, I don’t think we should.”

“Why ever not?” asked Sansa. “This poor girl needs justice!”

“I don’t disagree,” said the Duke. “It’s just...I don’t think we should be the ones to find her. You’ve heard the rumours about me, surely. About my mother.” He opened the snuff box and showed her the lid — inside was painted a miniature of a very pretty woman, her long silver hair shining in waves over her shoulder and her simple white dress. Sansa looked from the miniature to the dead woman and understood. _She looks like his mother!_

“A dead woman who looks like your mother,” she said.

“With a Lannister snuff box underneath her skirts,” he nodded.

“And a note drawing you out here, so you can be discovered with her...corpse,” Sansa finished, her voice growing faint on the last word. “Yes, you’re right, you can’t be found here. Someone is obviously setting you up.”

“How do you know I didn’t do it?” the Duke asked. “Do you have that much faith in a stranger?”

“You’re hardly a stranger,” Sansa said, unable to hide the fondness in her tone. “We’ve spoken to each other numerous times by now, and if you wanted to hurt me, you could have done so in your garden that first night. Your reputation may be evil and demonic, but you’re actually a very nice person. And you clearly need my help.”

“_I_ need your help?”

“But of course!” Sansa said. “Someone is obviously trying to blame you for this girl’s death, and if everyone thinks you did it, they’ll stop looking for who actually did it. You can’t find her — but I can.”

“You?”

“Of course, me. I’m the daughter of the Honourable Ned Stark — no one in their right mind would ever think that _I_ would kill a woman and draw demonic signs all over her body. You can’t be seen here when she’s found — but I can be. I’ll raise the alarm. No one needs to know you were even here.”

“People would have seen us leaving the ballroom together.”

“Then you need to make sure you’re back in the ballroom when I raise the alarm. If they do question you, I don’t know...Say I was boring, so you left me out here. I’m sure you can find an excuse.”

“For leaving you here alone?”

“Make it a good one, will you?” Sansa asked. “Not something that will ruin me, but something mildly interesting.”

“Has it occurred to you that whoever killed this girl may still be around? And they may want to kill again?”

It hadn’t, actually, but Sansa pushed the thought out of her mind. “Nonsense. No one has any cause to kill _me_,” she said haughtily.

The fleeting hint of a smile crossed the Duke’s lips. “Are you so sure of that?”

Before Sansa could do more than draw a breath to respond, the sound of voices caught her ear. There was a pause in the music, and other couples were coming out onto the balcony. Fortunately, Sansa was between the Duke and them. “Quickly! Go! Over the side, and then double back around so you’re in the ballroom when she’s found. Station yourself by Cersei, if you can; she’s your family. She’ll help you. What are you waiting for?”

“A chance to draw my breath?”

“Draw breath later, get inside now,” Sansa ordered, shoving the Duke towards the railing, careful to keep herself between him and the ballroom doors. And to avoid the dead girl. “And call on me. Tomorrow. Number Twenty-two, Wolf Street. If you make it seem like you’ve come to court me we’ll be left alone to talk.”

Sansa flapped her hands at him in an effort to get him to shoo, but he paused at the railing. “Why are you helping me?”

_Because I like your smile, and your eyes, and your sense of humour._ “Call it a sense of fair play. Now go!”

He went, and Sansa counted to thirty to give him time to get away. Then, drawing in as much breath as her corset would allow, Sansa dropped to her knees beside the bench and let out a blood-curdling shriek.


	8. The Next Morning

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He went to sleep with the problem of murder on his mind, and awoke to an altogether different problem that had to take into hand before he could rise for the day.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Honestly this is one of my favourite chapters. Grab a fluffy blanket, some tea and a biscuit, and enjoy!

Honour commanded that Tyrion present himself, as promised, at Lady Sansa’s residence the next day.

Pride, however, dictated that he not do so too promptly.

Therefore, it was late afternoon by the time Tyrion set off for Wolf Street — _because where else would Starks live?_ he thought to himself — easily evading the pursuit of a large man whose clumsy attempts at surveillance marked him unmistakably as a Gold Cloak, albeit without the cloak. The encounter did little to improve Tyrion’s mood. Did the authorities really believe that he was a demonic creature who would murder a woman at his own cousin’s ball?

The whole thing stank worse than the stable of a Braavosi whorehouse.

Between the rumours, the note, and the arrangement of the body, Tyrion had the uneasy suspicion that he was the prime actor in a drama whose script was known to everybody but him. He was used to being on the stage, but he was also used to knowing his — and everybody else’s — lines.

And what of Lady Sansa? What was her role in all this? She’d appeared in his garden so soon after his arrival in King’s Landing, seemingly by her own volition. But perhaps she was a ruse too? A willing collaborator in whatever plot was coming towards him, tempting him with her womanly charms and her wit and kindness? She’d certainly been in his thoughts enough since they’d met, and since they kept meeting. The number of times their paths crossed, and her presence by his side at the exact moment the note was dropped began to seem something more than coincidence. Maybe she was the one who dropped the note?

Tyrion conjured up the image of Lady Sansa as she’d been last night — her elegant figure and shining red hair. In her pale gown, her hair arranged in ringlets and bound by ribbons, she was the perfect image of a debutante — but for the disconcerting directness of her conversation. 

However, no matter how Tyrion tried to get his mind to suspect Lady Sansa of dastardly deeds, he couldn’t make it fit. If Lady Sansa were part of a scheme designed to implicate him in murder, one would think she would have raised the alarm and drawn half the ballroom to their side, not urged him over the balcony to safety.

Unless, of course, that was merely a piece of the plot. In the wee hours of the morning, in his gloomy bedchamber in his parents’ abandoned mansion, Tyrion’s imaginings ran rampant, first picturing Lady Sansa betraying him and blackmailing him, but then they shifted to imaginings where she attempted to blackmail him, and he was forced to serve her in payment, on his knees before her, as her hands dug into his hair and forced his face, oh so firmly, beneath her skirts, to where she was bare for him…

He went to bed with the problem of murder on his mind, and awoke to an altogether different problem that had to take into hand before he could rise for the day.

The town house on Wolf Street hardly presented a sinister aspect. Light shone in bright patches through the windows, fighting bravely against the gloom of a drizzly King’s Landing afternoon. Even through the rain, the flowers planted in the boxes outside the windows of Number Twenty-Two Wolf Street lent a cheerful aspect to the day, and Tyrion could see a drawing room through the drapes, with a pianoforte in one corner and some comfortable looking grey upholstery facing a cheerful fire in the grate. It all looked entirely respectable and utterly benign, but just in case all wasn’t as it seemed, Tyrion was glad he’d brought along the cane that had a blade hidden within it.

“Yes?” A young-looking butler opened the door in response to Tyrion’s knock. 

“Tell Lady Sansa that the Duke of Casterly is here to see her,” said Tyrion. The man bowed and showed Tyrion inside, before shutting the door with a soft click. He took Tyrion’s wet coat and hung it up for him, ushering him into a sitting room before heading further into the house. Tyrion looked around, curious as to what a happy home would look like. It had been a long time since he’d set foot in a King’s Landing house that was pleasant rather than gloomy, and Number Twenty-Two Wolf Street was pleasant indeed. The room was tidy, decorated in warm browns and soft greys, and smelled of fresh flowers, beeswax candles, and lemon oil. 

Tyrion felt himself beginning to relax. It was hard to think of duplicity or blackmail happening in a house that smelled of fresh flowers and lemon oil.

There was a large portrait over the fireplace, featuring a bride and groom and surrounded by their families. Tyrion could see Lady Sansa standing on the groom’s side, her face beaming in a happier smile than he had ever seen from her. _I wonder if she would look so happy in a portrait with me?_ he wondered.

“Well, _really,_,” came the voice of the woman who had so captured his heart, her voice displaying clear annoyance.

He turned away from the portrait to see a pair of doors leading to another room. He crossed closer to them, and noticed them to be slightly ajar. Which was beneficial, as looking through a keyhole would have been undignified (even if it was at a very convenient height for him). Looking through a gap between the doors, however, was quite a different matter.

Tyrion positioned himself comfortably at the gap, through which he could see Lady Sansa gesticulating with considerable vigour, her slender fingers fluttering and a delicate blush staining her cheeks. There was a man in the room with her, but all Tyrion could make out of him was a frock coat of a dull brown and close-cropped white hair, thinning in the back.

“Really, Ser Barristan,” fluttered Lady Sansa. She sounded entirely unlike the decisive woman who had ordered Tyrion off the balcony the night before, and Tyrion was fascinated by the change. “I can’t think what I can tell you that I didn’t tell everyone last night.”

The man drew a notebook out of his pocket and flipped it open. Licking a finger, he thumbed through the pages.

Tryion froze, transported to another time, another place. Standing in his mother’s greenhouse as the Casterly Rock magistrate licked his finger and flipped through his notes, the susurration of the pages grating against Tyrion’s raw nerves. 

In this time and place, the King’s Landing magistrate turned, and Tyrion knew there was no doubt to his identity. The same magistrate who had investigated his parents’ death, who had declared his mother a murderer, was now here in King’s Landing, investigating this case. Tyrion had no doubt that the true killer would never be brought to justice — Ser Barristan tended to stop looking as soon as he had a suspect. At least, that was Tyrion’s experience with the man. He was close-mouthed, lazy, and refused to listen to the truth. Ser Barristan, he recalled, preferred to judge first, and investigate later.

Consulting his notes, Ser Barristan recited, “‘Dreadful, just dreadful. Oh, heavens, it was dreadful.’” He looked up at Lady Sansa. “Do you have anything to add to that statement, Lady Sansa?”

Lady Sansa lifted her chin imperiously. “It was a frightful experience, and I cannot believe you are being so unkind as to ask me to revisit it.” She clasped her hands to her chest in a girlish action. “Have you no finer feelings?”

The magistrate looked pained. “What I have, Lady Sansa, is a woman murdered.”

_And, from the looks of it, a massive headache,_ Tyrion thought. _Serves you right._

“Well, it wasn’t _my_ fault I discovered her,” pouted Lady Sansa, managing to sound quite as empty-headed as any debutante could wish. “It might just as well have been anyone!”

“But it wasn’t anyone, Lady Sansa,” Ser Barristan sighed. “It was you. And —”

“I do call it most unfair!”

“-And yours is the only testimony we have as to the killer.”

“Well, really, I didn’t see much,” said Lady Sansa petulantly. “He was wearing a cloak. But he was tall, I can tell you that. With a limp. I think I saw a flash of pale hair, and a dark coloured ring. His shoulders were above the height of the rosebushes he ran past, that’s all I know for sure.”

Ser Barristan sighed. “Lady Sansa, you do realise that giving false testimony is a crime in and of itself?”

Lady Sansa drew herself up to her full height and looked down her nose at the magistrate. “I have already told you precisely what occurred. I ventured onto the balcony for air and happened upon that poor, poor woman. It was, I can assure you, _most_ unsettling.” She paused, looking troubled, then added spiritedly, “I am not accustomed to frequenting establishments with corpses on their balconies. It is _most_ untidy.”

Ser Barristan closed his notebook with a snap. “Yes. Yes, I suppose one may call it that.” He tucked his notebook in his pocket and bowed shortly. “Forgive me if I tell you that I find your account of the evening’s events unenlightening, Lady Sansa. Distinctly unenlightening.”

Lady Sansa looked thoughtful. “Unenlightening,” she murmured. “Do you know, I had wondered why they didn’t bother to light the torches on the balcony that night. They’d gone to all that effort with the roses in the urns, but there were no torches. I thought it a funny sort of thing for Mrs. Lannister to overlook.”

“Sansa,” said someone quellingingly. A woman whom Tyrion hadn’t noticed before rose from the soft grey settee in the corner of the room. She was dressed modestly in a pale blue wool dress with a high neck and white trim on the collar and sleeves, her brown hair framing her round face in soft waves beneath her white lace cap. “Ser Barristan, we shouldn’t take up any more of your time. I am quite sure that if Sansa recalls anything she will notify you at once.”

The magistrate harrumphed and took his leave, escorted to the door by the butler. Tyrion deemed it prudent to draw out of sight as the butler escorted Ser Barristan to the front door. Tyrion watched from behind the drapes as the magistrate looked back at the house and sighed in frustration, before mounting his horse and trotting away.

The butler came in to fetch Tyrion and merely raised an eyebrow at the sight of a Duke hiding in the drapery. He waited for Tyrion to extract himself before moving to the connecting doors.

“The Duke of Casterly,” the butler intoned as he flung the connecting doors wide open, revealing a pleasant, more relaxed sitting room than the one he’d been waiting in, a fire crackling merrily on the grate. A cheerful rural scene was hung above the fireplace, while a novel lay open on the settee and a plate of lemon cakes sat on a small, round table.

It was the kind of room Tyrion had often dreamed about being in — warm, cosy, surrounded by family — and for a moment it took his breath away. None of the rooms at Casterly Rock had ever felt like this, even when his parents had been alive.

The two ladies turned in Tyrion’s direction. Lady Sansa looked him up and down. “You’re late.”

“Don’t you know us creatures of the night cannot travel by day?” Tyrion said, trying to regain his equilibrium but still somewhat rattled by the sheer hominess of Twenty-Two Wolf Street.

“It is still day,” pointed out Lady Sansa. “It is merely somewhat later in the day. The sun has not yet set, your Grace.”

“Sansa,” said the woman in the white lace cap, which Tyrion remembered seeing accompanying Lady Sansa into various ballrooms. She was also, quite clearly, the bride from the portrait in the previous room.

Lady Sansa threaded an arm through that of the woman in the white lace cap. “This,” said Lady Sansa fondly, “is my goodsister, Lady Stark. Roslin, may I present to you the Duke of Casterly?”

“My lady,” he said pleasantly as he bowed at her.

Lady Stark smiled at him. She had a pleasant-featured face, though looked somewhat tired around the eyes. “Your Grace,” she said with a nod. “You are very kind to call.”

There was something rather disarming to being called kind. “I understood the summons was somewhat in the nature of a command,” he said.

“Don’t be silly,” said Lady Sansa. “We have much to discuss.”

“We do?”

“Yes, we do,” said Lady Sansa firmly. 

Before she could launch into whatever it was she wished to discuss, Lady Stark intervened. “Would you care for some tea? A lemon cake?”

He seated himself on the couch Lady Stark has gestured him to. “Yes, thank you, that would be lovely.” It had been a while since breakfast, and tea was always welcome.

Lady Stark turned to Lady Sansa and raised her eyebrow. Lady Sansa raised hers in return, and Tyrion was delighted to see them having a silent discussion that ended in Lady Sansa muttering “fine!” and coming to serve him tea.

* * *

Sansa served the Duke his tea, and then sat on another settee, watching as he sipped his tea and said nothing. She looked at Roslin, who sat beside her, also sipping her tea.

Sip, went the Duke.

Sip, went Roslin.

Sip, went the Duke, and Sansa was about ready to scream for him to say something, anything, to help her understand what she’d seen last night, to understand why someone would do a such a thing, to understand why someone would wish for his Grace to be present when the body was discovered, but she couldn’t find the right words.

Not if she didn’t want Roslin to be mad at her for risking her honour by being alone on that balcony with him. Roslin was kind and understanding, but not that understanding.

“So tell me, your Grace,” said Roslin, “How do you know my goodsister?”

The Duke carefully placed his cup in its saucer and put it upon the table. “She was introduced to me a few weeks back, at one party or another. I believe my cousin Cersei introduced us. I was at her ball last night when Lady Sansa discovered, well, discovered…”

Roslin clucked her tongue and put her cup down as well. “An awful business, that, just awful. I thank you for coming to check on Sansa, your Grace. It is very kind.”

The Duke smiled slightly. “It is nothing, Lady Stark. My cousin would have come herself, except she is still herself upset from the events of last night.” It was all Sansa could do to hide her smirk, knowing full well that Cersei Lannister wouldn’t have thought of her at all. “She asked me to come in her stead, since she knows…”

The Duke trailed off, and Roslin made an inquiring sound. “Knows what?”

The Duke gulped. “Knows how fond of Lady Sansa I have grown, through our meetings since I have returned to King’s Landing.”

_Oh,_ thought Sansa. _Oh._

Roslin looked between them — the Duke’s fingers plucking at his breeches, Sansa gripping her cup tight enough for her fingers to go white, and grinned. “Chayle? What’s that? Oh, if you will excuse me, your Grace, I believe I can hear the butler needing my assistance. I’m sure I can trust my goodsister to entertain you, can I not?”

Sansa nodded, and Roslin placed her cup down and stood. Her footsteps were swift as they walked to the door, and although she pulled the door too behind her, it was left open just a crack. 

“Did he ask any questions about me?” The Duke asked, and for a moment, Sansa wasn’t sure who he was talking about.

“Oh, the magistrate? No, no questions about you. Just myself, and what I was doing on the balcony, and whether I saw anyone. I described a man to him — quite made up, really. Tall, in a long cloak, with pale hair.”

“I have pale hair.”

“Yes, but no one in their right mind would describe you as tall,” Sansa heard herself snipe, and gasped, clapping her hand over her mouth.

Fortunately, the Duke chuckled. “No, they wouldn’t. Thank you, Lady Sansa, but why conceal my presence?”

“I should think that would be obvious,” Sansa said.

The Duke shook his head. “Not to me.”

Sansa shrugged, and poured herself another cup of tea to stop her hands from fluttering all over the place. “I found the timing of the note...suspicious. It was almost as if someone wanted you out there, to be found along with her.”

“Not to discount the obvious, but how do you know I didn’t do it? That this isn’t all some elaborate ruse?”

“So, you killed a woman, then arranged her body, then had an associate drop a note to lure you out onto the balcony in my company…” Sansa couldn’t stop herself from smiling. “To what end? To implicate yourself to exonerate yourself? That’s a bit much, your Grace. Far too twisty-turny. No, it’s far more logical for someone else to have done it, and to be attempting to frame you. But who?”

“This isn’t a game, Lady Sansa,” the Duke said. “It’s not some puzzle for you and your friends to twitter over as you pass the time sewing.”

“I never said it was!” said Sansa, unable to stop the frustration from entering her voice. “It’s not just a game or a puzzle — she was a real woman! A real woman who’s killer may never be revealed if everyone just goes around accusing you. Justice needs to be done, your Grace. And if Ser Barristan won’t find who killed the girl, then we should.”

“And how do you suppose we do that?” he asked with a sigh.

“It seems to me, whoever killed that girl wanted you to be charged for her death — so it is someone who wants to see you suffer.” Sansa leaned back and tapped her chin with her finger. “If you ask me, I believe someone put about that ridiculous ‘demon imp’ rumour on purpose, to disgrace you. It’s terribly easy to start a rumour as long as one whispers a word in the right ears. _Especially_ if one whispers that it’s all in the strictest of confidences.”

“Say that is the case,” the Duke said with a nod. “And then what?”

“Then we have to answer a different question, but one that will most likely have the same answer as to who killed that girl.” Sansa paused for dramatic effect, and noticed the Duke lean forward towards her. “Who wants to see you hanged?”

“Beheaded,” the Duke said with a frown. “They behead peers. They don’t hang them.”

“Because that is infinitely preferable,” snarked Sansa. “Either way, you’re dead.”

The Duke cocked his head thoughtfully at her. “Are you always this direct?”

“Not always, though I do find it saves time — time you are currently wasting.” She nodded her thanks as he reached forward and refilled her tea cup for her. “It’s a rather clever way to commit murder, you must admit,” she said softly. “Death by jury. By implicating you for another murder, the murderer manages to see you dead without taking the blame himself. You’d be both dead _and_ discredited. It’s really quite a well thought-out plan.”

“Forgive me if I fail to share your enthusiasm,” the Duke said dryly, helping himself to one of the lemon cakes when she offered the plate to him. “I say, these are good!”

“Lemon cakes are my favourite,” Sansa said, before taking a sip of her tea and placing the cup back down on the table. “Now. Back to business. In the ordinary course of things, one would suspect your heir of having designs on your fortune. Who _is_ your heir?”

“Uncle Kevan,” the Duke responded dryly. “But I can’t imagine him trying to go around and murder me. He’s a well-established man of middle years, and he certainly isn’t in need of money. Aunt Dorna brought a considerable dowry with her to their marriage, as I remember. My cousin Jaime is an officer in the army, so he has his own income, and Cersei…”

“Last I saw her, Cersei was being comforted by Prince Viserys,” Sansa finished. For all she didn’t like the girl, she thought the other debutante deserved better than that. Prince Viserys had such cold hands and always smelled of dead flowers and damp things. “Alright then, if your heir doesn’t want to shuffle you off this mortal coil, who does?”

“Who does what?” asked Roslin, re-entering the room and thereby cutting off Sansa’s line of questioning.

“Oh, his Grace was just telling me about the new pair he got for his curricle. I was saying that if he doesn’t have the best horses in King’s Landing, then who does?” lied Sansa smoothly. Roslin didn’t need to know about murderers and other such things.

“Did you bring them today?” asked Roslin, crossing to the window.

“No, my lady,” said the Duke, picking up the lie much to Sansa’s relief. “I am still awaiting the delivery of my curricle. It should arrive within the week.”

Roslin nodded. “Oh, it is such a pain how long these things take sometimes, it really is.”

“Indeed,” murmured the Duke, and he looked helplessly at Sansa. At least, she thought that’s what that expression meant. 

“I do look forward to seeing it,” Sansa said. “I’m sure it is of the most exquisite taste.”

“Yes, you must call on us when it is here,” said Roslin. “Why, I believe the King is due to review his troops in Baelor’s Park next week. Perhaps you could escort Sansa? It is sure to be a delightful time.”

_Good lord she wishes for me to marry him!_ thought Sansa, as she realised all of a sudden that without the knowledge of their previous discussion, the closeness between her and his Grace could be taken as romantic interest — after all, he was a Duke, and therefore A Good Match. Sansa looked over at the Duke and couldn’t stop herself from blushing. He really was handsome, and kind. She hadn’t entered into today’s discussion looking for a husband, but if he were to offer for her, she didn’t think she’d say no.

“Er, well…” the Duke looked awkward, then seemed to steel himself and nodded. “It would be my pleasure to escort Lady Sansa. What time shall I call on you?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Since so many of us are in quarantine/lock down/self isolation, my beta and I have decided that we're going to post twice a week now! So this story will update on Wednesdays and Saturdays from now on <3.


	9. Baelor's Park

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sansa and Tyrion go on a date.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A line taken from S03E10 ‘Mhysa’.

Tyrion had no idea where he’d found them, but Bronn had come through with a lovely pair of matched bays, and a curricle with the Lannister crest upon it.

It had been frightfully expensive to arrange, apparently, but Tyrion had simply handed Bronn a full purse and told him to take care of it. He just hoped the horses weren’t stolen.

He looked at them suspiciously. In his experience, horses were dangerous at both ends and uncomfortable in the middle, and given that they were taller, heavier and stronger than him in every way, he disliked them on principle.

(Most people were taller, heavier and stronger than him, and he also disliked most people on principle. He was a simple man).

Still, there was nothing for it. King Varys was reviewing his troops in Baelor’s Park, and the ton was aflutter with excitement over it. He’d heard of nothing else over card games and port all week, and even his fellow Hellfire members were planning to be there. Taking a deep breath to steel his courage, Tyrion clambered up into the curricle.

“Shall I drive, my lord?” Pod asked from where he was holding the horses still, and Tyrion laughed. 

“Have you ever driven a pair before?” Tyrion asked, and Pod blushed.

“No, my lord, but…” the boy trailed off, and Tyrion’s mind busily filled in what his valet hadn’t said. _But you’re small. But you look silly. But I’m stronger than you._ All thoughts Tyrion had been trying to chase out of his head ever since he’d realised what he was, all those years ago.

“I’ll be fine, Pod,” Tyrion said. “I’ve done this before.” _Long ago, but still,_ he justified to himself. _How hard can it be?_ He grasped the reins and after a few fumbles, managed to get them properly situated in his hands. They felt strange, but a faint twinge of muscle memory chimed at him. He could do this.

Pod looked uncertain, but moved away with a bow, and Tyrion was left in control of a beautiful pair of matched bays and his very own curricle. He tapped the whip on the flank of the right side of the pair, and clucked his tongue, and hoped like hell that he made it to the end of the day alive.

* * *

Sansa leaned over the edge of the curricle. “Are you sure you shouldn’t have taken the gate to the left? If you’d like, I could —”

“I’m not letting you drive,” said the Duke, carefully steering his pair through the grounds that thronged Baelor’s Park. Sansa knew they’d come in the wrong gate, but the Duke was sounding all bristly and defensive, so she backed down.

Almost backed down. “I’m really quite an excellent whip,” Sansa informed him. “I can drive to an inch.”

Or, if not to an inch, at least to two or three inches. There had been only one little incident with that farm cart back at Winterfell, and really, if people insisted on driving smack in the center of the road, what could they expect?

Robb still complained about how she’d ruined his greys, but honestly. If his horses were so easily discombobulated by one incident with a pair of bullocks, well, perhaps they weren’t the horses her brother had thought they were.

Concern over Robb’s reactions to matched pairs had led Sansa to suggest the Duke collect her from the next street over, rather than outside Twenty-Two Wolf Street. With how Roslin had all but thrown her at the Duke the other day, Sansa just didn’t want the fuss that would have happened had it been known she was going out with the Duke. Better to just keep it quiet — and more exciting, too.

“The stands are over there,” she gestured down one of the swooping drives. “We’ll have to tether the horses somewhere and walk.”

“I think not,” sniffed the Duke, and he steered them slowly, if competently, down the drive. “We’ll sit in the royal stands.”

Sansa blushed, realising that she’d almost forgotten that pertinent detail. As a Duke and the Queen’s cousin, he was naturally entitled to some of the best seats on the viewing platform, and to tether his pair immediately behind the platform. He flicked a gold piece at a lounging squire to care for the horses while they watched the parade, then gallantly helped Sansa out of the curricle.

She felt quite the grand lady today. People had watched them drive by with fascination (helped by the fact that Tyrion had driven in the wrong gate and they’d had to go the long way around the park, generally pushing through the crowds), and now she was going to sit in the special reserved section of the stands. She’d been here once before, with her father, but since he’d left for Winterfell she and Robb hadn’t been allowed back into these stands and had had to settle for the lesser ones with the other lower-ranked nobles. It was nice to be back in the best seats.

Even the presence of Lady Cersei and Prince Viserys wasn’t going to ruin Sansa’s day. She greeted them correctly, of course, but was very relieved when the Duke led her to a seat on the opposite side of the box. The Duke was gallant to the extreme, for all that she had basically coerced him into bringing her today — she felt a small twinge of guilt at that, but quickly squashed it — calling over a wandering vendor and buying her some deep fried dough covered in powdered sugar.

And then handing her his own kerchief when the powdered sugar went everywhere, as was it’s want.

They still had to talk — Sansa suspected there was more to the discovery of the dead girl and the Duke than she knew so far — but there were so many people around that such a private conversation was nearly impossible. Why, she had to lean completely over to hear the Duke speak in her ear whenever he had a comment to make.

And by the Gods did he have comments to make. It turned out that while Sansa could rattle off the details of the women of the ton, and many of the more eligible bachelors, the Duke seemed to know everything about everyone else. As the various units of the King’s troops marched past, their black and gold armour glinting as brilliantly in the sunlight as the rubies on the royal family’s crowns, the Duke regaled Sansa with stories of the various depravities and peccadillos that the nobles in the stands opposite were known for. Some of the stories perhaps were not technically suitable for a young lady of gentle breeding such as herself, but Sansa was fascinated by them nonetheless — and also, not as sheltered as one might have expected her to be.

Northmen were known for their plain speaking, after all, and though Mama had tried to shield both Sansa and Arya from any suggestion of coarseness, she couldn’t be everywhere at once. Northmen had loud voices and Sansa and her sister had keen ears.

All in all, it was a delightful afternoon spent with the Duke, watching as the King reviewed his troops. Or rather, Crown Prince Rhaegar rode out to review the troops on a fine black stallion, while the King sat on a throne in the stands not far from them and muttered constantly under his breath.

Sansa didn’t know much about politics, but she was sure that trouble was going to come from that direction sooner rather than later. She made a mental note to hurry up and find a husband who could take her far away from here, before the King released his already visibly tenuous hold on reality.

But first, she had to help the Duke find out who had murdered that girl, and who wanted to frame him. Though having listened to his litany of gossip this afternoon, Sansa could see why perhaps someone wanted him dead. He seemed to know something about everyone, even if sometimes it was the most tenuous of assumptions.

“Anyone named Desmond Crakehall must be a pervert,” he’d declared at one point, and despite Sansa insisting that really, Lord Crakehall was a very kind man who was far too enamoured of stamps to be remotely interesting, let alone interesting enough to be perverted, he’d stuck to his assessment of the man. It had taken Sansa dabbing a bit of powdered sugar from her finger onto his nose to break the Duke of Casterly from his claims about just how perverted Lord Desmond Crakehall would likely turn out to be.

The look of shock that the Duke had expressed when he’d crossed his eyes to try and view the tab of powdered sugar on the tip of his nose had nicely distracted him, and Sansa hadn’t been able to control her giggles.

But the parade was over now, and there was no way they were going to be able to move their curricle — move _the Duke’s_ curricle, Sansa needed to remember she had no claim to it — for some time, as crowded as the grounds were. So when the Duke suggested they take the time to speak to some of their friends while waiting for the crowds to thin, Sansa leapt at the opportunity to trot over to where the Tyrells were sitting in one of the lower stands — making sure they knew she’d been sitting in the royal stand, of course.

Margaery had been suitably jealous, and had made quite cutting remarks about Sansa’s jewellery (Sansa thought her jewellery was elegant and understated; Margaery thought it very plain and boring), and Sansa had left the conversation feeling very pleased with the outcome.

The glower on the face of the Dowager Duchess of Highgarden boded ill for Margaery, Sansa felt.

* * *

The parade of military might was as boring as hell, and Tyrion deeply regretted being roped into attending the damn thing.

The only high point of the day had been the fact that he’d managed to chat with some of the other Hellfire members, who confirmed that there had not been a revel recently, which reassured Tyrion. He needed to make sure he was still in Viserys’ good books if he was to find out what his father had been doing with a Hellfire symbol written in someone else’s hand in his diary, and if gatherings were happening without him it was a bad sign for his investigation.

Relieved, he’d even spoken directly to the Prince about it, asking when the next revel would be held. The Prince had looked sad — or had attempted to look sad, but he was a terrible actor.

“Not for a while, my dear Casterly,” the Prince had sighed melodramatically. “After all, we’ll need to find a replacement for you.”

“For me?” asked Tyrion, worried that he was being removed from the club before he got the chance to find out anything useful.

Well, anything more useful than the perversions of a number of members of the ton.

“Yes, since the girl you favoured is dead,” the Prince said bluntly. “It seems like you got a bit carried away, didn’t you old boy? Though I did admire your style, setting her up at your cousin’s ball. She was most...relieved to have someone to comfort her that night. And getting your new bit to find your lover? Very clever, Casterly, very clever.”

The Prince turned an assessing gaze on Lady Sansa, who was speaking with the Countess of Pyke. “Will you bring her to our next revel, I wonder? Since she’s already fallen so far as to take up with you? I didn’t think the Starks were that desperate, but since she’s clinging to you so firmly…”

Tyrion’s head whirled at the Prince’s news — and his assumptions, and threats, about Tyrion’s relationship with Lady Sansa. He wanted to protest, to say it was nothing like that, nothing of the sort, but he couldn’t get the words out around the lump of grief in his throat for Shae.

Of course it had been Shae. No wonder she’d looked familiar to him.

Lady Sansa turned at that moment and saw him, a lovely smile gracing her face as she saw him watching her. Her gaze moved to the Prince talking to him and her smile faltered, but she kept her head high and turned back to the Countess of Pyke.

Tyrion didn’t think Lady Sansa was interested in him romantically. No one was ever interested in him romantically. In Essos, all of his lovers had made it clear that they had either been charmed by his golden tongue or were curious about what sex was like with a dwarf. Although he’d enjoyed his time with them, he’d never deluded himself that they loved him, or saw him as anything more than an entertaining diversion — or a source of income.

So it was fitting, in Tyrion’s mind, for Lady Sansa to have another form of interest in him. None of the gossip he’d been able to gather had implied that the Starks were strapped for cash — it more seemed that a run of bad luck had struck the family, none of it pecuniary in nature — but gossip wasn’t always true.

Maybe Lady Sansa had seen him as an easy mark, and had gone out of her way to make herself more interesting to him.

But it was a slim chance — she would have needed an excellent network of informers to a) know he was back in Westeros and hanging around his father’s townhouse and b) how to pique his interest in such a thorough way.

_If Lady Sansa’s interest in me is all fake, does that mean that she killed and staged Shae? Or was at least responsible for it?_

The clouds scudding across the sky caused shadows to shift and meld, and for a moment Lady Sansa’s hair looked as if it were blood spilling down the back of her dress.

No. He was being ridiculous. Lady Sansa was just a kind, gentle, thoughtful, intelligent young woman — though nosy and a busybody. He couldn’t gainsay that.

But she wasn’t a killer. He knew that, down to his very bones.

The Prince wandered off to torture someone else, hopefully through words rather than actions, and before Tyrion knew it the crowds had started to thin and it was time for him to escort Lady Sansa home. He found her chatting with her aunt, the Princess Lyanna, and after the aunt had turned to speak with someone else they left the royal stands.

The boy who Tyrion had paid to hold their horses had apparently decamped, leaving the reins lying looped on the seat. Tyrion was just grateful that the horses and curricle were still there — being stranded in Baelor’s Park without them would have been most undignified.

“Casterly,” said Lady Sansa, halting as she drew near the carriage. “What on earth is on the seat?”

Inwardly cursing that she could see into the curricle easily while he could not, Tyrion hauled himself into the curricle to see what she was about and froze.

“Don’t touch those!” he snapped, seeing Lady Sansa reach for the small white blossoms, slightly crushed and scattered across the seat along with a smattering of glossy dark green leaves. “Not the flowers, not the leaves, none of it. Forgive my harshness, my lady, but they’ll give you a nasty rash. Or worse.”

“Worse? They’re just flowers.”

“They’re manchineel — Death Apple flowers. They’re highly toxic. Ingested, they cause a nasty, prolonged death.” 

He should know. He’d seen it happen.

“Oh,” said Lady Sansa, pulling back and twisting her hands together. “Look, there’s a note,” she said, gesturing with her chin.

“I’ll get it,” Tyrion said and reached out gingerly with a gloved hand, plucking up the folded piece of paper by a corner. It had been sealed with a single blob of red wax, stamped with a seal he didn’t recognise — and couldn’t make out. It could have been a flower, a three-headed dragon, a lion, or a snarling wolf. The seal was utterly incomprehensible, and the wax itself was still warm.

Handling it carefully, he broke the seal as Lady Sansa came around to his side of the curricle and peered over his shoulder. 

“What is it?” she asked. “What does it — oh.” She rocked back on her heels and Tyrion missed the warmth of her at his back.

_Stay away,_ it said, in shaky block letters. And then, in letters from which the ink blurred and dripped like drops of blood: _Or she’ll be next._

* * *

_Well._ It was about all Sansa’s brain could manage. She kept trying to think of something — anything — useful or at least interesting to say, but all her brain could come up with was _well._

The Duke had gone bone white, and with a trembling hand had tucked the note inside his jacket. He scrambled down from the curricle and Sansa moved to the side as he trotted over to the bushes that marked the edge of the enclosure where their — where _his_ curricle was one of the last ones remaining — and after a few moments came trotting back, his face still pale but with a stout stick in his hand, a few spindly bristles stuck to the end of it.

He pulled himself back into the curricle and started to try and brush the flowers and leaves off the seat and onto the ground, but Sansa stepped forward. “Wait,” she said. “If you brush them to the ground, a horse could eat them or something. Here, brush them into my reticule.”

She dumped its contents — a handkerchief, a small sewing kit and a few coins — onto the grass, and held it open.

“Are you sure?” he asked.

“I’m wearing gloves,” Sansa pointed out. “It should be perfectly safe. And I can gather up my things and carry them home — they aren’t much.”

“We’ll have to burn your reticule, my Lady,” the Duke said. “The sap will likely soak into the fabric.”

Sansa’s face automatically shifted into a moue of disappointment — she liked this reticule! The beads were such a lovely colour! — but she held her arms steady. “Better my reticule than some poor horse’s stomach, or some urchin’s feet.”

Carefully, Tyrion brushed the leaves and flowers into her reticule, and they both gave the seat a thorough inspection before the Duke pulled the strings of her reticule tightly closed and took off his hat.

“Here,” he said, handing it to her. “You can put your things in here for now.”

His hair gleamed gold in the late afternoon sun, and Sansa did admire it’s gentle waves as she took his hat with thanks. She quickly put her items in the hat and handed it up to him, before swinging herself into the curricle and squeezing past him to take her seat.

He looked shocked at her actions, and Sansa blushed when she realised he’d probably seen her ankles — maybe even her calves! — and that she’d all but shoved herself in his face as she’d moved past him. “I’m sorry, Your Grace, it just seemed silly to make you climb down to hand me in when I am perfectly capable of getting into a curricle without any assistance.”

“Yes, good, well, yes,” he stammered, and took up the reins of his pair to drive them back to Wolf Street, unaware of how many people would notice them as they drove through King’s Landing, some hours after the parade had ended, with Lady Sansa’s reticule missing, the Duke’s top hat held upside down in her lap, and dusk very nearly upon them...

* * *

Sansa was in a cracking good mood the next morning. During their drive back to Wolf Street yesterday, the Duke had finally told her what he was about here in King’s Landing — trying to find who had murdered his parents. He was sure that the murdered woman at Lady Cersei’s ball and the flowers in his carriage were meant to discourage him from seeking justice for his parents, and Sansa was inclined to agree.

It was far more than she had thought the Duke would tell her — she had expected him to brush her off with platitudes — but apparently now that she had been threatened, the Duke felt she had a right to know what was going on. She was utterly thrilled that he’d taken her into his confidence — and that something actually exciting was happening for once!

Justice! Revenge! Threats! _Why, life certainly isn’t boring with the Duke around,_ Sansa thought with satisfaction as she cherrily made her way downstairs for breakfast. _I am so glad I went for a wander through his garden that night._

However, a most unexpected surprise came when she reached the bottom of the stairs and was intercepted by a footman who sent her into the formal sitting room, where Roslin sat facing their guest while Robb paced behind his wife like a caged wolf.

“Robb? Roslin? Whatever is the matter?”

Roslin looked up at Sansa and her mouth compressed into a frown, while Robb froze in front of the fire.

“Sansa,” Roslin said. “Do come in and shut the door behind you.” Her tone made it absolutely clear that it was an order, not a suggestion.

Concerned, Sansa did as she was bid. “Is everything okay, Roslin? Have you bad news from home? From Winterfell?” she asked as she stepped into the room and towards a chair, enabling her to finally see the face of their guest.

It was the Dowager Duchess Highgarden, and Sansa was honestly confused. _So not news from home,_ she thought. _But what on earth is Lady Tyrell doing here so early in the day?_

“Lady Tyrell, good morning. This is an unexpected surprise,” Sansa said as she took her seat, and the Duchess sniffed and stood.

“I will leave this in your hands, Lord and Lady Stark. But I thought you should know.”

“Of course,” said Roslin, standing to show their guest out. “Thank you very much for bringing this to our attention.”

“I can’t think what His Grace was thinking, leaving you children on your own. Honourable to a fault, Eddard is, and it makes him see honour in others where there is none.”

Sansa bristled, ready to defend Father, but Robb’s hand landed on her shoulder and squeezed, and Sansa bit her words back.

Roslin smiled through the barely-disguised insults that the Duchess slung at her and her family as she escorted the old woman out of the room. Sansa could hear them echoing down the hall, and the sigh of relief Roslin let out when the door finally clicked shut behind the old woman.

“Robb? What on earth is going on?” asked Sansa, and her brother slumped into a chair with a groan.

“We’re all in bit of a pickle, Sansa old thing,” said Robb. “You weren’t buying ribbons with Lady Margaery yesterday were you?”

“What?” Sansa asked.

“Yesterday, you told us you were out buying ribbons with Lady Margaery,” said Roslin as she re-entered the room. “You came back on foot, with a vague excuse for why your reticule was missing and your belongings were in your hands — and without any ribbons.”

_Oh, yes, the excuse I gave for my absence yesterday,_ Sansa recalled. _With how Roslin had been hinting when Tyrion visited the other day, I thought it simpler to just...lie._ Simpler, and if she was being honest with herself, more exciting.

“Sansa,” said Roslin, “Where were you really? Because Lady Tyrell assures us that you were not buying ribbons with Margaery. In fact, she tells us you were somewhere completely different, with someone completely different.”

“I, I- I did speak with Margaery!”

“Come on, Sansa,” said Robb. “Tell us the truth.”

“There’s nothing the least bit improper about taking a drive with a gentleman in an open carriage,” Sansa tried to defend herself, and Robb groaned and dropped his head into his hands.

“There is when you lie to us about what you’re doing, Sansa!” said Roslin. “Your parents left you in our care, and you’ve abused our trust to run around with that — that man!”

“That man? Tyrion is far nicer than his reputation would have you believe! You know this; you’ve met him!”

“Oh, ‘Tyrion’ is it? First names already? Sansa, this is serious!”

“He’s my friend, Roslin. That’s all! And you knew he was going to invite me for a ride in his curricle — you encouraged it!”

“I didn’t encourage you to lie about it, Sansa! And I had expected you to be properly chaperoned when you did it, not wander off on your own before returning home after dark with your hair a mess, your reticule missing and with society buzzing with the stories of how intimate you were with your ‘friend’ in a public setting?”

“Intimate? We weren’t being intimate!”

“That’s not what Lady Tyrell said, and not what we saw when he visited the other day.”

“The other day? Roslin, the other day you more or less threw me at him, leaving us alone like that!”

“Yes, well, perhaps Lady Tyrell was correct when she said Robb and I were too young to have responsibility for you, especially after what happened with Arya. I trusted your judgement, Sansa, and thought that perhaps you were making a good match with the Duke. A nice, well-chaperoned, proper match. But it turns out he was just playing with you, Sansa. And once he’s had what he wants from you, he’ll discard you — just as he discarded his former lover.”

“His former — who?”

“The girl, Sansa,” said Robb. “The girl you found at that ball the other week. She was finally identified, and she’s been linked to Casterly. Several people have given evidence that they were together — Prince Viserys among them.”

“Viserys? You know he’s a liar, and a creep!”

“He’s still a Prince of the Realm, Sansa. His word carries weight. And given your recent behaviour, are you really able to accuse other people of being liars?”

“So what now?” asked Sansa, looking between her brother and her goodsister. “Are you going to send me back to Winterfell, banished for the crime of having a friend and not telling you my every movement and thought?”

“No,” said Roslin as she stood. “We’re going to Casterly House. The Duke has disgraced you — and he will pay for what he’s done. Robb, bring your pistols.”


	10. Casterly Rock

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “You got me into this predicament, but by the Old Gods and the New, I will get myself out of it!”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Dialogue taken from S03E07 ‘The Bear and the Maiden Fair’, as well as from Lauren Willig’s _The Deception of the Emerald Ring_.

The groom declined to carry his bride over the threshold.

Which, given she was twice his height, was a sound choice, mathematically speaking. It did not stop the wags from their disapproval, however.

He could not, however, decline to offer her his arm, not with three hundred wedding guests thronging around them, eagerly awaiting any further tidbit of gossip that might be gleaned from the occasion of the demon duke marrying his disgraced bride.

Because disgraced Sansa had been, for nothing more than riding in an open carriage with a man who wasn’t wearing a hat.

Her brain still spun with the speed at which it had all happened. Roslin and Robb had dragged her to Casterly House, and Robb had challenged the Duke to a duel — nevermind that duels were illegal now.

Tyrion had looked at the shiny pair of pistols that Robb’s man was holding, and looked at her, and had sighed and agreed to marry Sansa.

And that had been that.

It didn’t matter what Sansa wanted, it seemed — society had been shocked by her behaviour, and so society had had to be appeased. Despite her fondness for the Duke — her Duke, now — Sansa had chafed at the restrictions society had placed upon her. Had chafed at how Roslin had contracted a chaperone for Sansa — the plain, gangly, old Miss Tarth — who trailed behind Sansa everywhere in public and refused to let her have a minute alone with Tyrion in the lead up to their wedding.

A minute alone to apologise to him, to tell him that this wasn’t her plan, that this wasn’t what she wanted. She’d just been looking for adventure, had enjoyed the idea of a mystery to solve, to have anything other than the endless round of balls and society gossip filling her brain.

She hadn’t wanted to trap a man into marriage.

No matter that they had been getting on quite well before this — no matter that she’d enjoyed his company, riding with him in his carriage, had thought about him more than once in quiet moments alone — but now he wouldn’t even look at her.

She felt his fingers on her arm like a brand as they moved through the crowded rooms of Casterly House towards the ballroom, where the wedding breakfast had been laid out with enough lobster patties to satisfy even the Earl of Storm’s End, a close friend of her father’s with a gluttonous appetite.

There hadn’t been time for her family to come down from Winterfell for the wedding, and Sansa felt their lack sharply.

The looks of unhappiness on the faces of Roslin and Robb, the looks of pity on the faces of society, the looks of triumph on the faces of the Tyrells...it was all too much for Sansa. She tugged on Tyrion’s sleeve.

He gave her the most perfunctory of glances. “Yes, my dear?”

“Could we please go somewhere private? Just for a moment?”

“Eager to make sure we can’t annul?” he asked.

It took a moment for the meaning of his words to sink in, and when they did, Sansa felt herself blushing right up to her hairline. “To _talk_.”

“We have plenty of time for that now,” he said, excusing himself from her presence with a courtly bow. “Till death do us part, in fact. So if you will excuse me…”

He disappeared through the crowds, leaving her standing alone at her own wedding reception in a breach of etiquette the size of the Westerlands. She saw the pitying looks surrounding her and _fled_, slipping through the crowds and making her way to the overgrown gardens at the back of the house. The gardens closer to the house had been tidied, but not these ones, further back as they are and facing Lord Duskendale’s residence. Standing among the chaos of the overgrown garden, her dress torn on brambles and twigs caught in her hair and remembering how fascinating she’d found the Duke that night when she’d first met him not so far from here, Sansa broke down and cried.

* * *

“May I be the first to wish you happy?”

“You could be, if it were a happy occasion,” Tyrion muttered as he slung himself into a chair and reached for the brandy. “This, however, is not one of those.”

“Why not? You’ve got yourself quite the lovely wife.”

“She’s a child.”

“She’s taller than you.”

“She’s a _tall_ child,” Tyrion glowered. “Just because she managed to entrap me into this marriage doesn’t mean I wanted it.”

“You’re a lord, she’s a lady,” Bronn drawled. “And a beauty at that. I don’t see the problem.”

“The problem is, she forced me into this.”

“Really? She forced you? At swordpoint? You want to fuck the girl. You just don’t want to admit it.”

“I don’t pay you to put evil notions in my head!” snapped Tyrion, though if he were honest with himself, the ones already in his head didn’t need Bronn’s help. He’d had more than one dream about Sansa Stark coming to him at night in a thin, diaphanous nightgown, or coupling with him on a fur in front of the fire, or on her knees in front of him, her hair tumbling down to cover her breasts as her she looked up at him, her eyes dark with desire as her perfect rosebud mouth opened to take him in…

Though lately, those dreams had ended with him humiliated and alone as she’d stolen his money and left him for someone who he couldn’t quite see. Someone taller, and fair of face, and with perfectly coiffed hair.

Someone the complete opposite of Tyrion.

He hated sleeping now and refused it on principle. 

“Report,” he barked, the lack of sleep making him harsher than he usually was with Bronn — who, over the past few months, Tyrion had almost come to consider a friend.

“It’s not looking good,” Bronn said. “The trail has gone cold here. No matter what I can dig up, no matter who I bribe or shakedown...there’s nothing more in King’s Landing. Though I did learn one useful tidbit, from my source within the Gold Cloaks.”

“I didn’t know you had a source in the Gold Cloaks.”

“I have sources everywhere,” grinned Bronn as he refilled his glass. “And you’ll be glad of this one, as word is, Barristan has packed up and headed west in a hurry. Apparently he has some old notes back in Casterly Rock he wishes to re-examine. Something about a link between the murder of your lover and the murder of your parents.”

* * *

Sansa woke the next afternoon to find Casterly House dead quiet. The fire in her room had not been lit and no maid had come to bring her a tray and help her into her dress for the day.

With a sigh, Sansa dragged herself out of bed and pulled on a walking gown — not a dress she looked the best in, but one she could dress herself in without help. She pulled her hair up as well as she could, and ventured out into the corridor to see if she could find her husband and try and put this whole silly situation right.

He was trying to find his mother’s killer, and he didn’t need any distractions. Sansa meant to let the Duke know that just because they’d been forced into these circumstances together it did not mean that they couldn’t find happiness together — or the killer.

It took some opening and closing of random doors, but eventually Sansa found another soul in the echoing house, a young man Sansa remembered her husband introducing to her at one point as...Cod?

“Good morning,” Sansa said, and Cod leapt a foot in the air and dropped a teapot on his foot with a curse.

“My lady! Morning!” he said, hopping on his other foot and wincing.

“Oh, dear!” said Sansa. “Sit down before you fall down, do.”

Cod hobbled over to a chair and pulled his boot and sock off. Cod and Sansa both bent to look at his foot, which was already starting to bruise.

“Can you move your toes?” Sansa asked, fairly sure that if his toes could still move Cod hadn’t broken anything.

Feebly, his toes twitched, and both Sansa and Cod sighed in relief. 

“Oh, good,” breathed Sansa. “Now, stay put, I’ll make the tea.”

“Are you sure, m’lady?” Cod asked, and Sansa tsked.

“Of course I’m sure! I can make tea. It’s just hot water and leaves, isn’t it?”

Cod looked sceptical, but Sansa was determined, and in short order was bringing a pot of tea back to the table where Cod sat. 

She even poured for him — Duchesses were meant to be kind to those less fortunate, after all — and was quite proud of the results.

Up until she tried a sip of it, and very nearly spat it back out.

“Oh! Oh, that’s…”

“M’lady…”

“That’s not good, is it?”

“No my lady.” 

Sansa looked forlornly at the pot, and sighed. “Well, there’s nothing for it. Is my husband home?”

“No, m’lady, he’s out.”

“Off at his club, I suppose.” All gentlemen had clubs, Sansa knew. Even Robb had a club and would disappear there from time to time — generally when Sansa and Roslin started talking about laces and hair ribbons. He failed to see what interest such things held, and no matter how many times Sansa had tried to explain it to him the explanation hadn’t stuck. 

Sansa didn’t wait for Cod’s response. “If my husband comes home, do tell him that I am visiting my family,” she said firmly as she walked out of the kitchen. “I shall be back for dinner.”

* * *

Except she wasn’t back for dinner, because as it turned out, Tyrion hadn’t gone to his club. He’d gone to Casterly Rock, the gossips said at everyplace Sansa tried to go. So horrified at being trapped into marriage with her that he’d fled as soon as he could, leaving her the King’s Landing townhouse and a handsome allowance so he’d never have to see her again.

_DEMON DUKE DISAPPEARS IN THE DARK_ shouted one broadsheet as Sansa had hurried home, her head held low to hide her shame.

Fortunately, Robb and Roslin were home, and they welcomed her back with open arms.

“Oh, my dear, I’m so sorry,” Roslin had whispered as she’d taken Sansa into her arms. “I didn’t think he’d do something so base as to run away,” she’d said as she’d soothed Sansa.

“What a coward! A leech! A dunghill, a rank, whitefeathered chicken-hearted hector!”

“Leave the chickens out of this, please,” sobbed Sansa, and Roslin giggled.

“Well, he is!” Robb insisted. “I’m of a mind to grab my pistols and sort this out, once and for all!”

“Grabbing your pistols is what got me into this mess in the first place,” snapped Sansa. “His Grace and I were going along quite merrily as friends until you marched me over there and demanded he restore my honour or demonstrate his! No, you got me into this predicament, but by the Old Gods and the New, I will get myself out of it!”

“How are you going to do that?”

“I’m going to go to Casterly Rock, and I’m going to force that man to listen to me, and I’m going to bring back my husband! Are you going to come and help me or not?”

* * *

“Look,” Sansa said quickly, more to distract herself than anything else. “That must be the castle. Do you see? There. Through the trees.”

Her companion looked up from her novel and looked decidedly unimpressed. “What did you expect to see? The Titan of Braavos?”

“It doesn’t look terribly castle-like,” Sansa pouted. There weren’t any battlements, at least none that she could see. There was a vast dome in the center, and two symmetrical wings stretching out to either side. Mostly she could see the ocean, and the sun setting behind the castle and making it look as though Casterly Rock wore a crown of light.

“Castles are as castles are,” said Miss Tarth austerely, and not for the first time Sansa cursed Roslin for insisting that Miss Tarth accompany her on this trip. Apparently, it wasn’t Done for young ladies to travel across Westeros unaccompanied — even if she was married now. 

Roslin and Robb had claimed that they couldn’t accompany Sansa to get her husband back because they were expecting, and the doctor forbade travel at this point. Sansa had been torn between being thrilled for her brother and goodsister and being most irked at their timing, though she did suppose that the nerves of impending parenthood helped explain the extremes of panic and stupidity to which usually level-headed her brother and goodsister had reached recently.

“That doesn’t mean anything at all,” said Sansa, and Miss Tarth had simply sniffed and turned back to her book.

Which was how it had been the entire trip — Miss Tarth had been scribbling in her notebook whenever she hadn’t been scolding Pod, who had also come along to be reunited with his master.

(Sansa had been perfectly embarrassed when she’d learned she’d been getting his name wrong this whole time, especially since she’d called him ‘Cod’ to his face more than once. It was only when Miss Tarth was haranguing him for how he’d been stacking their baggage that Sansa had learned of her error)

Between Pod, who stuttered and blushed every time she spoke to him, and Miss Tarth, who refused to look up from writing in her notebook, Sansa was beyond bored.

Their carriage drove up the stately drive and Sansa was surprised to see Tyrion waiting for them at the foot of the stairs below the portico. Standing by himself at the center of the vast circular drive, his dark coat contrasting with the pale stone of the castle and his curls whipping in the wind, he looked, thought Sansa, particularly alone.

“You,” he said as Sansa descended from the carriage.

“Me,” she nodded in response. “You didn’t think you’d be rid of me that quickly, did you? In sickness and in health and all that.”

Tyrion sighed. “I should have known you’d put two and two together.”

“Is it about your mother? I promised to help, you know I did.”

“I would have thought it better for you to remain in King’s Landing,” Tyrion said.

“Better for whom? For you?”

“Of course,” he shrugged. “Whom else?”

“You might try thinking of someone other than yourself for a change. Just for variety.”

“As you do? I’m sure your appearance in my garden was arranged entirely for my convenience.”

“Why should I think of your convenience when you are so adept at doing so for yourself? Why, how many other girls have you canoodled with who lack a brother as protective as Robb?”

“Oh, about as many young men as you have flirted with to ensnare them,” Tyrion spat.

“I never!” Sansa gasped. “You do yourself too much honour, and myself none at all!”

“How quickly the pot turns on the kettle.”

“If you weren’t so entirely debased yourself, you wouldn’t be so quick to judge others by your own standards!”

“If you find yourself running short of terms of abuse, I suggest ‘degenerate cad’ for your next go. Or you can just slap me and get it over with.”

“Only if I had a gauntlet to do it with! Though I forget, you have no honour to defend!”

“And yet, here you are, hunting me down instead of applying for an annulment. What does that say about you, Lady _Lannister_?” he sneered, and Sansa felt her face go white with shock.

“Are you two quite done? Because I would rather like to disembark the carriage now,” snapped Miss Tarth. “Though you are at least giving me some decent dialogue.”

Blushing, Sansa moved to the side and Miss Tarth disgorged herself from the carriage, unfolding her long legs and raising herself to her full height. 

“Casterly,” she nodded. “Kind of you to welcome us. I am Miss Tarth, your wife’s companion. You may remember me from King’s Landing?”

From the look on his face, it seemed that the Duke did in fact remember the tall woman who had trailed Sansa around in the lead up to their wedding. “Welcome to Casterly Rock,” he said with grumpy politeness.

The tall woman looked around with interest. “Oh, this will do as a setting, yes. No, Pod, you don’t unload the bags like that, oh heavens no!” and promptly bustled around to the back of the carriage, leaving Sansa once more alone in the company of the Duke.

Her husband.

“My lord,” she began, meaning to apologise, when a loud “hullo!” called across the grounds made her spin on her heel.

Trotting across the lawn on a magnificent white horse was Ser Jaime Lannister, his hair gleaming gold in the sun, as a carriage made its way up the drive.

“Thought I should give you a moment’s warning, cousin,” said Jaime as he reined his horse in. “The whole family is here, lovely. I’ll take my old room,” he declared, throwing his reins at Tyrion and dashing into the house before anyone could stop him.

* * *

It was beyond strange to be in the suite of rooms he still thought of as his father’s, mused Tyrion as he moved down the staircase later that evening. He hadn’t given much thought to his apartments when he’d raced here upon hearing Bronn’s news, and when the servants had ushered him into the ducal suite he’d been too dead on his feet from the long ride to protest overmuch.

Besides, it was conveniently placed for searching his father’s papers before Ser Barristan could turn up with a warrant.

It was even stranger still when Uncle Kevan gestured him to the place at the head of the table, in the great state dining room decorated with murals of the daring deeds of Casterly’s past.

Tyrion took the chair at the head of the table with studied nonchalance, trying to pretend that he had meant to take that seat all along; just as he pretended that he had planned to take Lady Sansa to wife all along. Tyrion had never eaten in this room before; as a boy, his meals had been taken in the nursery, or when the mood struck his mother, alfresco in the gardens. He felt like an imposter in his father’s place.

He wasn’t the only one who seemed to think so. Aunt Dorna’s air was even frostier than usual, and it wasn’t hard to guess the reason why. In his absence, it was Uncle Kevan who would have occupied the seat at the head of the table — and Uncle Kevan had never married a debutante under duress and then fled town in the middle of the night.

Aunt Dorna, Tyrion reflected, wouldn’t in the least have minded if he had been swallowed by a sea serpent en route to Essos all those years ago.

As it was, she was regarding Sansa with a distinctly territorial air from where his wife sat opposite Cersei. “I’m sure this isn't what you are used to, Lady Sansa,” she said regally.

“No, it isn’t,” said Sansa frankly. She had changed into a dress of pale silver satin covered with silver net; pearls glimmered at her throat and ears and to Tyrion, she looked like an ethereal moon spirit. _If only her character was as lovely as her looks,_ Tyrion mused. “The dining room at Winterfell is much better lit. And warmer. Have you thought of installing more modern lighting?”

Aunt Dora’s mouth opened in outrage, and Uncle Kevan jumped in. “I don’t know where Jaime has gotten to. I suggest we start without him, what do you think, your Grace?”

“It’s Tyrion, Uncle. Just Tyrion,” he sighed, but signalled the servers to begin their work.

The soup, found Tyrion as he took a sip of it, was both tasteless and tepid, despite the regal tureen appointed for its transportation from the kitchens. Said kitchens were, as Tyrion recalled, about a mile through a maze of corridors that would have daunted the Minotaur.

Sansa gingerly sampled her soup and set her spoon down with a firm click. To Tyrion she asked “Have you thought of renovating the kitchens to bring them closer to the dining room?”

“I —” began Tyrion, but Aunt Dorna cut him off.

“The arrangements at Casterly Rock are just as they should be.” Aunt Dorna smiled so fixedly at Sansa that Tyrion suspected she was having fantasies of running Sansa through with her fish knife. “Given how recently Winterfell was established, you, of course, would not understand what it is to manage a house such as this.”

Tyrion thought that a bit rude — while the Lannisters had been ennobled back in the Age of the First Men, the Starks had received their ducal crown some three hundred years ago when Aegon I Targaryen conquered most of Westeros. The Starks were hardly new money — which Aunt Dorna should know, her father himself having been a merchant and her grandfather a wastral.

“No,” Sansa agreed demurely, directing herself to Tyrion. “Winterfell is much more modern, and built on a much more agreeable scale. We haven’t your disadvantages.”

As much as Tyrion begrudged Sansa for trapping him into this farce of a marriage, he did admire her quick thinking and clever tongue.

His musings on whether Sansa could ever be persuaded to put her clever tongue to more lascivious uses were cut short by Uncle Kevan. “If you would like to learn more of Casterly Rock’s history, your Grace, I —”

Aunt Dorna’s bosom swelled. “The cost of maintaining a house such as Casterly Rock is more than you might imagine, even without the addition of such costly renovations as you propose!”

Uncle Kevan cast Tyrion an apologetic look. “The revenues of the estate have been down over the past few years,” he said in a conciliatory way. “And most of the easier seams in the mines have dried up. We still have more to mine, of course, but I judged it not worth the added expense at this time. There was the roof to be releaded, and the old duck pond to be drained, not to mention the tenants’ houses…”

“I’m sure everything is just as it should be,” said Tyrion quickly.

“You see?” asked Aunt Dorna to Sansa. “Renovations are quite out of the question, even if they were warranted — which they are not!”

“Oh, finances are no matter,” said Sansa sweetly as she dipped her spoon back into her soup. “My dowry is quite appallingly large.”

Aunt Dorna’s spoon clanked against her bowl but Sansa carried on as if she hadn’t heard a thing. “We have no gold mines, of course, but Winterfell does have some rather good tin and copper mines, which do us very well. We also have a number of exclusive trade agreements with the Free Folk, though as a simple woman, what would I know about such things? All I know is that upon my marriage to his Grace, half of my dowry was transferred to me, with the other half to follow when I turn 25. It’s standard practice, up North,” she explained, “not to hand the entire dowry over at once.”

Uncle Kevan looked thoughtful. “How much did you say your dowry was?”

Sansa named a figure that made even Cersei’s mouth drop in shock.


	11. The Haunted Bedchamber

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The tapestry hanging to the right of the fireplace undulated in the draft, a draft that seemed to come from nowhere. The candles guttered and sputtered as the sound of the wind whistling down the chimney resolved itself into a low moan, a moan that sounded like someone calling in a rasping voice: “Sansa...Sansa…”

Sansa’s room looked like it hadn’t been slept in since the last time a Targaryen dragonrider had paid a formal call.

The bed was of the old variety, with vast carved posts and hanging that could be drawn shut to keep out drafts, mice — and ghosts. Sansa was fairly sure that Casterly Rock, being such an old castle, had to have more than its fair share of ghosts.

The casement windows with their leaded glass appeared to have been designed to keep out the light and let in the draft. They rattled ominously as the wind rose, straining against the catches that held them fast and causing the candles in their tall stands to gutter.

It was all very atmospheric — and entirely inconvenient. All in all, if there was a place where Sansa felt sure she would see a ghost, it would be in this dusty old bedchamber. 

When Lady Dorna had delivered Sansa to her room, she had told her, in smug tones, that she hoped Sansa wouldn’t mind being in the Haunted Chamber. Apparently it was the traditional boudoir of the Duchess of Casterly Rock, but Sansa, looking around the gloomy and utterly unfeminine room, thought Lady Dorna was rather pulling her leg. She’d have to get that sorted out, quick smart. 

She mentally added getting the chimneys rebuilt to her list of things to do when Tyrion finally admitted their marriage was legitimate and that she was here to stay. There was no reason for them to smoke the way they did. Some larger flues, more modern chimney pots — really, this room would be quite cozy without the haze of smoke currently filling it.

And then there was that dining room. It was foolish for the family to have to choke through cold soup for the sake of dining in the old style when it was just family at the table. There were a dozen smaller chambers that didn’t seem to be doing anything in particular, all of them closer to the kitchen than the formal dining room and any one of them suitable to be turned into a family dining room while the kitchen was being reconsidered.

Why, Winterfell was nearly 300 years old and even it managed to have kitchens situated suitably close to the grand dining hall so that food wasn’t cold when one received it. Knowing full well that she couldn’t redesign the kitchens without having seen them, Sansa wagered to herself that they were of the subterranean, late-medieval variety, with huge fireplaces designed for roasting whatever the lord of the manor happened to haul in over his saddle. Winterfell’s had been like that until Sansa’s mother had pointed out how stupidly unnecessary they were; now Winterfell had a nice modern kitchen, to go with it’s nice modern indoor plumbing.

Sansa glared darkly at the chamberpot sticking out from under her bed. _Really,_ she thought to herself. _I feel like I’ve gone back in time, coming here!_

She brushed her hair out with such vigour that it fair crackled as she thought of the changes she would make to Casterly Rock. She coughed as another gust of smoke blew back down into the room, and vowed to start with the chimneys. Or at least, get herself moved to a more modern room in the morning. There had to be one — she couldn’t imagine Lady Cersei putting up with this sort of thing.

Shaking back her hair, she pulled her dressing gown around her shoulders and went to peer around the fire screen to see if there was anything she could do to fix the situation right now. The wind was whistling back down the chimney, producing more smoke than heat. _There must be a bird caught in the flue,_ Sansa thought, hearing a rustling and scrabbling sound that seemed to echo from behind the stones.

_Or maybe it’s mice?_ Sansa wrinkled her nose. She really wasn’t the least bit fond of mice. Ghosts were one thing; rodents quite another. Ghosts didn’t chew one’s pillow and leave nasty droppings in one’s shoes. Really, mice were very nearly as horrid as chickens.

The scrabbling was louder now, and sounded almost like...footsteps. Sansa reached out and lifted the poker from beside the fire, edging closer to the fireplace. If that was a mouse, it had awfully large feet. And was wearing boots.

Experience had taught Sansa that contrary to what nursery rhymes would have you believe, mice did not generally go shod.

The tapestry hanging to the right of the fireplace undulated in the draft, a draft that seemed to come from nowhere. The candles guttered and sputtered as the sound of the wind whistling down the chimney resolved itself into a low moan, a moan that sounded like someone calling her name in a rasping voice: “Sansa...Sansa…”

_Oh, for heaven’s sake, this is absurd!_ Thoroughly annoyed with herself and the entire situation, Sansa marched forward and yanked on the tapestry. The demure embroidered maidens swayed towards Sansa as the tapestry gave easily from its gold bar, revealing a wall of solid stone.

Or was it? On the other side of the fireplace, the window embrasure was a good three feet deep, deep enough for a wide, dusty, moth-eaten window seat. The wall on this side was in line with the edge of the fireplace, however — and this was an external wall. There was no reason for the wall on this side of the fireplace to be in a different place than it’s match on the other side.

Feeling rather foolish, Sansa tentatively poked at a few of the stones, trying to remember how the heroine had opened the secret passage in _The Convent of Orsino (by a Lady)_. It had something to do with the stones, Sansa remembered. One of the stones creaked, and Sansa poked again, harder. When that didn’t work, she gave a most unladylike shove.

The wall swung forward with a low groan, revealing an alcove liberally festooned with cobwebs. Sansa was very pleased to see there were no skeletons in chains, nor did a bat or any other creature of the night fly out at her, and she coughed at the swirl of dust that had filled the air from the movement of the wall. She peered inside the alcove and saw that it turned into a stone staircase — a staircase with the burned out end of an old-fashioned torch set into a bracket and a flight of stairs spiraling down into regions unknown.

Tightening her dressing gown, Sansa wedged the door open with the handle of her hairbrush, took up a lit candle and shoved a spare in her dressing gown’s sash just in case, and set out to solve the mystery of the staircase.

It wasn’t like she could get to sleep knowing that the stairs were there, after all. She may as well find out what was at the end of them — then she could sleep, her curiosity sated.

_Curiosity killed the cat,_ Roslin’s voice sounded in Sansa’s mind, and mentally Sansa stuck her tongue out at her goodsister. _And satisfaction brought it back,_ she replied to the imaginary Roslin.

The center of each stair was hollowed from long use, and Sansa wondered if they were original to the castle. She picked her way carefully down, debris crunching underneath her slippers.

She didn’t like to think too closely on what that debris was made of — but she did note that it sounded a lot like the scratching and scrabbling she’d heard from behind her chimney. Sansa began to suspect the Duke and his family were playing a nasty joke on her — perhaps to get her to run screaming from them, so he could annul the marriage on the grounds that she was insane. Or lock her in the attic, until everyone had forgotten that she even existed.

Perhaps she shouldn’t have spoken so about her dowry at dinner — mayhap she’d given them ideas.

She reached a landing where the stairs branched off in multiple directions — but there was light coming from one direction, and one direction only. _Why, whoever it is hasn’t even bothered to close the secret door all the way behind them!_ she thought, spying the back of a heavy tapestry much like the one in her room.

Gathering her skirts and her dignity alike, Sansa swept the fabric aside, announcing, “I know what you’re doing!”

* * *

Tyrion blinked, frowned, and blinked again, eyeing the glass in his hand with suspicion. “Going to bed?” he asked mildly, in the hope that a reasonable answer would cause the apparition of his wife to disappear. Or at least, cause her clothing to disappear.

Except she didn’t disappear, instead coming to an abrupt stop in the center of the floor, leaving the tapestry flapping behind her. She was dressed for bed in a dressing gown of rich blue velvet with a cascade of lace at the sleevers, her glorious red hair falling around her shoulders and halfway down her back in gentle waves. He caught the scent of lemons coming from her, and knew that this was no dream.

After all, his dreams had never quite been able to capture her perfume.

He looked in disappointment at his glass. Probably not a whiskey-caused hallucination then.

Sansa opened her mouth then closed it again, cocking her head to the side. “What are you doing here?” she asked.

Tyrion made a show of looking around him. “The last time I checked, this was my room. I was going to bed. Which begs the question, what are you doing here?” The fabric of the dressing gown molded rather nicely to her legs, and Tyrion was enjoying the view very much. He’d enjoy it more if she took it off, of course. He had to hand it to his wife — she may have trapped him in a marriage he didn’t want, but at least she was easy on the eyes. “Did you change your mind, and decide that you don’t want to annul this farce of a marriage after all?”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake!” she huffed, taking the seat opposite him and reaching over to steal his glass of whiskey. When he objected, Sansa merely glared at him and tossed it back — and immediately bent over coughing. “Oh, by the Seven, that is foul! How can you drink that stuff?”

Tyrion rescued his glass back and poured himself another dram. “You get used to it. So if you aren’t here to steal my innocence, why are you here?”

“...you weren’t just making scrabbling noises in the tunnel behind my room and moaning my name, were you?”

While Tyrion had moaned Sansa’s name in the past, it had been before she’d trapped him in this marriage, but he certainly wasn’t going to tell her that. “I can say with some assurance that I was not,” he said firmly, trying to shove his more lustful thoughts away.

“Did you know that there was a tunnel behind my room?”

“There are tunnels everywhere throughout the Rock, my lady. It comes with the age of the castle. Stairs, priests’ holes, subterranean tunnels — we have them all.”

“Well, it was a secret to me,” Sansa said as she folded her arms across her chest, making her dressing down gape in interesting ways and allowing a peek at the nightdress below. Tyrion shifted slightly, but could see no more. “Have you thought of affixing labels to these passages, for the edification of the unwary? Or do you prefer to surprise your guests with nocturnal visitations?”

“Of the two Lannisters in this room, my lady, I am not the one roaming the night. Why do you have a candle stuck in your sash?”

“I didn’t know how far the stairs would go. I didn’t want to be caught in a subterranean cavern without a candle.”

“Most resourceful of you.”

“I believe in being prepared for every eventuality,” said Sansa grandly. “Well, every _foreseeable_ eventuality. I did _not_ forsee that the stairs would end in your bedchamber.”

“I am crushed,” Tyrion drawled. “You were expecting dungeons? A torture chamber?”

Sansa flushed, but tossed her hair back in a defiant gesture. “If you will line the walls with secret passages…”

“I’ll make sure to add a skeleton or two, just for form,” Tyrion promised. “Would you like cobwebs as well?”

Frowning at a smudge on her sleeve, Sansa grumped, “Those you have already.”

_Gods, she’s beautiful,_ Tyrion marvelled as he watched her clear blue eyes flick over the room. _Too bad she played me the fool the entire time. I did enjoy her company._

“Why did you do it, Sansa?” Tyrion asked.

“Explore the secret passage?” she responded, and Tyrion harrumphed in frustration.

“Insist on the marriage,” he said. “I thought we were friends.”

“So did I,” she said, sounding entirely frustrated. “And I did not insist on the marriage. Quite the opposite. I was the one trying to convince Robb to let the whole thing go, remember? Insisting that there was nothing to be concerned about?”

Tyrion thought back to that night, but couldn’t remember clearly past Robb’s rage at him, at the memories the anger stirred up at how his mother had been treated by Society…_Witchwoman’s brat,_ they’d called him, and they’d laughed and jeered when he was alone. He couldn’t go back to being alone. He couldn’t.

So he’d said yes, and had blamed Sansa for it. For a situation he was starting to realise may not have been her fault after all — even if she did insist on butting her nose in where it wasn’t warranted at the slightest provocation.

He looked at her — really looked at her this time — and saw not a cunning and clawing woman, desperate for a convenient duke in her bed and ducal jewels upon her brow, but the woman he’d been half in love with since she’d wandered into his garden at midnight all those weeks ago. Who had made him laugh, who had treated his quest to find the truth about his mother with utter seriousness, who had listened to his stories and dabbed powdered sugar on his nose in the middle of a park to make him laugh…

The woman who had haunted his dreams in various states of deshabille almost from the moment he’d met her.

Tyrion realised he’d misjudged his bride harshly — but hoped there was time to put it right. “Sansa —” he began, when she held her hand up.

“Do you hear that?”

“No?” he said, then upon straining his ears, changed his mind as from behind the tapestry leading to the secret tunnel came a thud, followed by a loud moan. “Oh. _That_.”

“I’ll get the candle,” she said briskly. “Would you like to go first?”

‘Like’ was perhaps too strong a term, but there was no way Tyrion was going to let his wife to first — especially given his recent clarification of his feelings towards her. He considered encouraging her to stay behind, then thought better of it. Some lost causes were noble; others just lost. “That case, on the table over there. There are two pistols. Hand one to me.”

“And the other?” Sansa asked, proffering the case.

Tyrion plucked it out of the case and handed it to her, butt first. “Shoot them, not me.”

Together, they ducked behind the tapestry and through the gap in the paneling. There was a mechanism that controlled it — Tyrion remembered that much from his childhood exploring the tunnels out of curiosity and the desire to avoid having to eat tripe — but someone appeared to have forced it open.

He didn’t remember the passageways being quite so grim. Or cold.

“Do you see anything?” asked Sansa just as a misshapen shadow lurched into view, moving with a shambling, uneven gait.

Tyrion cocked and levelled his pistol. “Drop your arms and show yourself!” he commanded.

“Drop my —” The voice was young, familiar, and more than a little bit slurred. The shadow resolved itself into a man in a caped greatcoat, the hem of which he promptly tripped over and crashed on the floor.

“Jaime?” Tyrion asked, prodding his cousin with the toe of his boot. “What on earth are you doing here? And why weren’t you at dinner?”

“Yes I was,” he slurred, and the smell of alcohol on his breath made Tyrion rear back and nearly stumble into Sansa.

“He’s foxed,” Tyrion muttered, wondering how on earth he was going to get his strapping young cousin out of this passageway.

“I’m not — that is — maybe I’m a little — hic! Indish — indish — under the influe-whatsis.”

“A little?” murmured Sansa, and Tyrion sighed. 

“Can you help him up?” Tyrion asked Sansa. “I’ll get the door.”

It galled him to have his wife be the one to lever his cousin off the floor, but having tried once or twice before to lift a drunken friend back in Braavos Tyrion knew he didn’t have the mass to move someone of Jaime’s build.

Sansa gave him the pistol and bent to her task, leading to a very drunk Jaime happily nuzzling her. 

Or perhaps not so happily. “You’re not her,” he frowned, pushing at Sansa who held him fast.

“Not who?” asked Tyrion. “And what the devil have you been drinking? Your breath could strip paint!”

“Blue ruin,” slurred Jaime. “I’m ruined. Ruined with blue ruin, and ruined with her.” He looked at Tyrion with sudden alarm. “You won’t tell Father? She’d never forgive me if I told. ‘You mustn’t tell’, she said. ‘You mustn’t. I’ll be ruined.’ Don’t tell. Please.”

“Your secret is safe with us,” Sansa vowed, and Tyrion made a mental note to teach his new bride how secrets are best kept until they are more usefully shared.

Then again, perhaps his own cousin wouldn’t be the best subject of that lesson. Not if he wanted Sansa to think him anything other than a monster.

Between them, they managed to get Jaime out of the passageway and into the bedroom, wrestling him over to the bed where he flopped down with a groan. “Gods! If I could only make it all just go ‘way!”

“I rather expect it might, at that,” Tyrion said prosaically. He pulled the empty chamber pot out from underneath the bed and positioned it where he figured Jaime would see it if he retched over the side of the bed.

Jaime caught at the hem of Sansa’s robe and looked up at her with glittering eyes. “I need more gin,” he demanded petulantly.

“No you don’t,” Sansa said as she yanked her robe out of his grasp. “More gin is the last thing you need.”

“If I can’t have her, I should at least have gin,” Jaime pouted, then with a sudden movement he scrambled to the side of the bed and retched. Sansa turned away in a rush, and Tyrion remained looking at Jaime just long enough to confirm that the chamber pot was doing it’s duty before joining his wife in studiously looking away from the pitiful sight of Ser Jaime Lannister throwing up. “‘Once we have the money,’ she said. ‘We just need the money.’ Why don’t we have the money? Why do you have the money?” he mumbled, and threw up once again.

“I keep seeing her — keep seeing —” Jaime said when the retching sounds had stopped. They turned around to see Jaime curled into a ball on the bed, cradling his head in his hands. “Everywhere I go I see her. And Ser Barristan.”

“Ser Barristan?” asked Tyrion.

“Aye. Saw him at the Cockeyed Crow. He didn’t see us though, no, we’re too clever for that. My love is too clever for that. ‘We must stay hidden,’ she told me, and so we did. But I heard he suspi — he suspick — he thinks you did it.” His words were slurred, but his intent was clear. “He thinks you killed Shae.”

“Of all the —” began Sansa indignantly, but Tyrion cut her off with a hand on her wrist.

“Wait,” he said. His voice sounded too loud for the room, and he could hear it echoing in his ears. He forced himself to focus on his cousin’s face, the familiar Lannister features that he shared. So familiar, yet so alien when seen on another’s face. “How did you know that?”

Jaime’s eyes drooped shut. “Shaw — I mean, saw — him in the Crow. Told you that. Jusht now.”

“No.” Beside him, Tyrion could hear Sansa’s sudden sharp intake of breath. He forced himself to go on, to ask his cousin the one question he didn’t want to ask — the one question that could ruin any suggestion of happiness in his marriage even before it got started. “How did you know that name?”


	12. The Duchess

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Her answer startled a laugh out of him, and she looked so pleased with herself, so smug, her lips pursed in that smirk that was so entirely and delightfully hers, her gloriously red hair tumbling down around her shoulders, that it was just impossible not to kiss her. His fingers, of their own volition, curved around her cheek, the strands of her hair brushing his wrist, catching on his sleeve, glittering crimson in the firelight.
> 
> Tyrion was still shaking slightly with laughter when his lips touched hers.

Sansa froze, realising that the name had to belong to the woman they’d found dead at Lady Cersei’s party. _How does Jaime know who she is? How does Tyrion_ she wondered. She only knew because her brother had told her — she didn’t think the name of the woman found dead at Cersei Lannister’s party was publically known.

She thought about trying to shake some answers out of Jaime but he looked positively ashen — and the smell of what he’d thrown up into the chamber pot was making Sansa feel unwell herself.

Her duke seemed frozen in shock, so Sansa made a decision. She grabbed his arm and pulled him with her, back into the secret passageway.

“Come on,” she said, and was mildly surprised when he came along without protest. She led him back to her room and shut the secret door behind them, firmly.

The sound of it clicking shut seemed to wake him from his haze. “I shouldn’t be here.”

“Why not?” she asked tartly, going to build up the fire before taking a seat on the bed. “We are married.”

He shuffled his feet, and Sansa sighed. “So. Shae.”

He nodded, his eyes on the ground.

“You knew her?”

He nodded again.

“And given how the news of her demise hasn’t rushed through the Ton like the after-effects of bad seafood, I’m guessing she...wasn’t of polite company.”

He shook his head.

“She was your...lover?” Sansa asked, desperately hoping it wasn’t true.

He finally lifted his head. “She was not! We were...thrown together. At some parties thrown by Viserys and his set. Most people thought we were lovers, and we let them, but...we weren’t.”

“Why not? She is — was — very pretty, even how I saw her.”

“Because she wasn’t you!” he snapped, and stepped close to her. “Maybe if you hadn’t been crowding through my head we would have been lovers, or maybe I would have taken up with one of the other girls, and she would be safe! But instead, you distracted me, you filled my head with your hair and your perfume and your voice and your kindness and your wit and so Shae and I spent our nights cloistered away talking. Only talking,” he said, his voice fading to a whisper. “Shae was a dancer. She wanted to hear about the dancers I’d seen in Braavos, the stories I could tell from my time there. Sometimes she’d practice her routines for me. She was good, Sansa. She was _so_ good. And because I knew her, because I was fond of her, because I spent time with her, she’s dead. And I’m scared — so scared — that the same is going to happen to you.”

Sansa was moving even before she knew she’d made the decision to. “No, it won’t,” she said as she took Tyrion’s hands in hers and tugged him closer. 

“How can you say that?”

“Because as lovely as Shae was, she wasn’t a Stark — and us Starks are damnably hard to kill. Don’t you know that in the North, our skin is made of steel?”

“The Starks of Winterfell, proof against knives?” he joked weakly, and Sansa smiled. “Is it the ice in your veins that makes you so?”

* * *

“Do you want to know the secret?” she leaned close to him and whispered. “We wear armour _under_ our clothes, not just over them.

Her answer startled a laugh out of him, and she looked so pleased with herself, so smug, her lips pursed in that smirk that was so entirely and delightfully hers, her gloriously red hair tumbling down around her shoulders, that it was just impossible not to kiss her. His fingers, of their own volition, curved around her cheek, the strands of her hair brushing his wrist, catching on his sleeve, glittering crimson in the firelight.

Tyrion was still shaking slightly with laughter when his lips touched hers. But he wasn’t laughing for long. He could feel her brief, startled movement, and then her hands slid around his shoulders, and her lips angled against his, and any laughter was lost, lost between their lips, behind the lids of his eyes, in a warm, velvet darkness where there was nothing but the feel of Sansa in his arms, the silk of her hair forming a tangled net around his hands, the velvet of her robe soft and supple beneath his fingers.

Sansa fit against him like they were made to be one, and he never wanted to part from her.

When the need for oxygen became too much they broke apart.They stared at each other, just a hand’s breadth apart, so close that Tyrion could feel Sansa’s breath against his cheek, feel her heart pounding wildly through their clothes. Or perhaps that was his heart pounding.

No other kiss had ever made him feel that way.

His arm was still around Sansa’s waist, tucking her close to him; her hair was still tangled in his fingers. Sansa blinked several times, her clear blue eyes slowly focusing on his face.

“Well, then,” she said. “Well, then.”

Tyrion knew exactly how she felt, and smiled gently at her while he dug around in his muddled brain for something half-way intelligent to say. “Well, then,” he agreed, his mind gloriously blank yet revelling in the feeling of Sansa in his arms at last.

“Was that...was that all right?” she asked. Tyrion felt his heart clench at the worry he could hear in her voice.

“All right?” he asked, his voice squeaking. He cleared his throat. “Sansa, that was more than all right. That was...splendid. Magnificent. Wondrous.”

“Oh,” she said, sounding pleased. “...shall we do it again?”

* * *

He woke the next morning with his wife’s leg thrown over and pinning him to the bed, while his hands were tangled in her hair, and Tyrion had never felt happier. They hadn’t done more than kissing and some gentle touches — Sansa was young, and inexperienced, and he wanted to take things slowly with her. To make things perfect for her.

He was lost to her, lost in her, and he knew it. At one point last night, when they had become horizontal on the bed and she was pressed along his side as he dropped kisses on the ivory skin along her shoulders she’d pushed him on his back and leaned over him. “No one else?” she’d said. “Just me.”

All he had been able to do was nod. “No one else. Just you. Now, and forever.”

“Now, and forever,” she’d agreed, and proceeded to trail kisses along his shoulders in return.

Speaking of trailing kisses...he gently lifted her hand, and placed a gentle kiss on the tip of each of her fingers, then on the palm of her hand and the inside of her wrist. He slowly trailed gentle kisses up her arm — making sure to avoid the inside of her elbows which he had learned last night were incredibly ticklish and prone to making her kick involuntarily. When he reached the top of her shoulder, he felt Sansa’s lips press the top of his head. 

“Hello, you,” she said.

“Fancy meeting you here,” he replied, leaning up to kiss her on the mouth. She slowly eased back down and he followed her, refusing to let their lips part for even the slightest moment, until they were once again lost in the pleasure of each other.

A loud caw from outside the window caused them both to start, however, and Tyrion smashed his nose into Sansa’s cheek, rather breaking the mood.

Sansa laughed gaily and extracted herself from the bedclothes, retiring behind a screen to change with a blush dusting her cheeks.

_She’s going to be a stunning duchess,_ Tyrion thought to himself as Sansa chattered on about the plans she had for the day. _Not the “go to King’s Landing and sparkle at parties” sort of duchess, though gods only know she’s brilliant at that, but the “organise the county gentry and bring all the tenants soup” sort of duchess._ He was well aware that in the short time Sansa had been at Casterly Rock she’d won the favour of his housekeeper, charmed Pod into agreeing to learn to read, managed to recommend a poultice for the gamekeeper’s sore leg, ensured that stores of grain were being built up for the oncoming winter, helped with the constant preserving of food, had warmed the cockles of Cook’s heart by asking for her recipe for lemon marmalade, and had Dabney the butler firmly wrapped around her finger.

In short, Sansa had very rapidly made Casterly Rock her home, and Tyrion was damned glad she had.

Now if only they could work out who had killed his parents and framed his mother for the murder, and therefore get Ser Barristan off his back, life would be just spiffing.

* * *

“A ball?” said Tyrion sceptically.

“A ball,” confirmed Sansa. “Our marriage did happen rather quickly, after all, and we both left for Casterly Rock so soon after it happened — and separately. It sent tongues quite a wag, you know. Which is why I put it about before I left that we are throwing a ball.”

“A ball?”

“A ball. A costume ball, to be precise. I quite like them.”

“And when is this taking place?”

“Next week. I’ve talked with Dabney and Mrs. Cerwyn, it’s all arranged. Or it will be.”

“A ball.”

“Yes, dear, a ball. Try and keep up.”

“I just...I thought maybe we’d have a bit of time to ourselves before the ton came beating down our door.”

“Well, you should have thought of that before leaving me in King’s Landing immediately after our wedding.”

“But, with Ser Barristan hanging around…”

“Ser Barristan hasn’t made hide nor hair of wanting to speak to you yet. He can snoop all he wants around town, but if all the gossip is of the coming ball rather than events from years and years ago, well, that’s not our fault is it?”

Tyrion stared at her. “You’re marvellous, did you know that?”

“I did, actually. Nice of you to catch up,” she smirked, and laughing, her husband led her out onto the balcony for tea in the soft afternoon sunshine.

* * *

Poor Tyrion looked utterly fluxxomed by the host of servants and helpers that had descended on Casterly Rock that day to prepare the ancient castle for the next night’s entertainments. Sansa watched from a balcony as he tried to cross the floor of the foyer and almost got run over by two servants carrying an occasional table and a maid with an arrangement of flowers bigger than he was, then nearly collided with the ladder that was allowing a footman to dust one of the chandeliers that hung over the whole scene.

He paused and looked into the ballroom, then thought better off it and hurried away when Dabney started to yell at someone.

“Come, my love,” said Sansa as she swooped down the stairs and intercepted him. “Let’s away somewhere else before we get flattened in the chaos.”

She led him away from the cheerful chaos that was the front of the house down a corridor, then down another. Sansa assumed that Tyrion knew where he was, because she hadn’t the foggiest idea. Casterly Rock hadn’t been designed with logic in mind.

Sansa chose a room at random. “Here,” she said, pushing open the door and stumbling into a tropical paradise.

Braziers burned in the corners of the room, creating a sultry warmth. Sansa could practically see the heat shimmer in the air. Flowers bloomed everywhere, flowers she had never seen before, flowers for which she lacked names. Some were ghost pale, while others flamed with colour, and together they filled the room with their heavy exotic perfume.

Through the glass walls, Sansa could see the lanterns had been hung in the gardens outside in advance of tomorrow’s ball, currently unlit but waiting like hopeful debutantes at the edges of a dance floor.

Sansa turned in a slow circle, the floating edges of her skirts brushing the corners of the flower pots and watching on low hanging flowers, smearing pollen on the fabric. “What is this place?”

“It was my mother’s workroom.” Tyrion brushed the flowers of a richly flowering tree, the delicate petals clinging to his red velvet shoulder and releasing a heady scent. “I hadn’t realised that Uncle Kevan had preserved it. This room was my mother’s greatest achievement. She catalogued plants no one had ever seen before, not in Westeros at least.”

“They’re lovely,” Sansa said. “Truly lovely. It feels as though we aren’t in Westeros at all.”

All the way in this odd nook of the castle, hiding from the chaos orchestrated by their butler, they might have been on a tropical island, a million miles away, lost in a soundless sea. The gentle light from the braziers transformed the room into someplace far away. Someplace without all of the rules and strictures of society. Someplace where nothing mattered but the two of them.

“Most of the plants are from old Valyria.” With a twist of his fingers, Tyrion broke off a silvery flower with a profusion of petals and offered it to Sansa. “Here. For your hair.”

Sansa ducked down and let Tyrion tuck the flower behind her ear, stealing a kiss from him before she rose again. Slowly, they walked through the workroom, Sansa marvelling at the wonders around her. Occasionally Tyrion would offer snippets of information about the plants they passed, generally stories that began with “my mother told me.”

It was in the middle of one story that Sansa drew to a halt, and gently placed a hand on Tyrion’s shoulder to halt his anecdote. “Tyrion? Aren’t those the same leaves that someone left in your carriage in Baelor’s Park?”

Tyrion whipped his head around to where she was looking and threw himself between her and the plant. “Don’t touch that!”

“I wasn’t planning to,” Sansa said, _Though it is very sweet that you feel the need to defend me against a plant,_ she said to herself. “What did you call it the other day? man- something?”

“Manchineel. Or Death Apple.” Tyrion glowered at the tree, which looked far more innocuous than Sansa felt something called the “Death Apple” ought to look. “I hadn’t realised it was still here. I had assumed…” he trailed off and ran a hand through his hair, disordering his locks. “Foolish of me. It’s not as though it was the tree’s fault.”

“The tree’s fault? Oh, no, Tyrion, you don’t mean…it was this tree, wasn’t it?” Suddenly, the pretty white flowers took on a sinister aspect.

Tyrion nodded. “This tree — the leaves were added to their tea. There aren’t many manchineel trees in Westeros. In fact, I’m not sure there are any oth…”

He trailed off, but Sansa finished the sentence for him. “There aren’t any others?”

“They don’t grow well in this climate,” Tyrion explained. “I know it took my mother several tries to grow this one successfully.”

“There might be others,” Sansa said. “It has been a while since your mother’s success with it.”

“But it’s not likely,” said Tyrion, which confirmed Sansa’s worst suspicions. If there weren’t any other manchineel trees in Westeros, that meant that whoever had left the leaves in Tyrion’s carriage had come from Casterly Rock. 

Sansa’s mind seized on the only explanation she could think of. “Casterly Rock isn’t precisely fortified, and without you or your family in residence, it was only lightly staffed. Anyone might have snuck in here.”

“The same person who snuck in and found that snuff box?”

Sansa nodded. “The very one.”

“It’s more likely —” Tyrion coughed, and looked away. “It’s more likely to be someone in the family.”


	13. The Ball at Casterly Rock

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He’d lost her.

“Have you seen my lady wife?” Tyrion asked Prince Viserys as the loathsome prince loitered by the refreshment table.

He’d lost her. Somewhere between finishing the receiving line and being waylaid by his aunt over some trifling matter (which he’d had great delight telling her to consult Sansa over, as Sansa was the lady of the house now), Sansa had disappeared. She wasn’t in the gallery, she wasn’t in the music room, and, as far as he could tell, she wasn’t in the ballroom. 

Tyrion felt a chill that cut right through the black velvet of his tunic. He never should have let his attention be taken from her, not even for a minute. He tried to take comfort in the fact that Sansa was the very opposite of a wilting violet, and would likely put up a dreadful struggle should someone try and harm her, but even Sansa could be taken by surprise.

_Stay away,_ the note had said. _Or she’ll be next._

Tyrion’s imagination presented him with a hundred horrible possibilities. A hand, reaching out of the darkness, grabbing Sansa’s gloriously red hair, bending her head back and setting a knife against her neck.

Leaving her pale and cold on a bench in the garden.

Forcing her to walk off the edge of the cliffs that ringed Casterly Rock and plunging into the sharp rocks below, her blood mingling with the cold waters of the Sunset Sea and her smile forever dimmed.

Or, most poetically, and therefore most likely, fed slices of a Death Apple, or served tea containing it’s leaves. Just as his parents had been.

“Lost the bitch already have you?” sneered Prince Viserys. “If you’re bored with her, I’ll take her off your hands. Always did like the ones with a bit of fire in them.”

Tyrion just blinked at the Prince, unable to parse his comments with visions of Sansa’s possible deaths running behind his eyes.

“Your grace?”

It was one of the footmen, clad like all the others in the Lannister livery of crimson and gold. But all Tyrion saw was the silver tray in his hands.

A silver tray bearing a single envelope of cream-coloured paper.

Inside, there was only one line, written in black ink that had blurred and dripped like drops of blood: _Lady Sansa awaits you in the folly._

* * *

“Is this really necessary?” Sansa demanded as Ser Barristan led her into the mirrored gallery through which Tyrion had taken her two days before when he was trying — and failing — to familiarise her with the warren of rooms that made up Casterly Rock.

Then, the mirrors had sparkled with late-afternoon sunlight and the air had sparkled with their conversation. Tonight, the room was filled with a chill brilliance, lit by sparse clusters of candles in branched holders, and she doubted the conversation with the magistrate would be sparkling in any way, shape or form.

“This is only necessary because you have made it so.” Ser Barristan closed the door behind them with a click and gestured for Sansa to take a seat on one of the backless benches set at intervals along the walls of the long, narrow room. She sank neatly onto the nearest one, her skirts swooshing into place just so, and Sansa could see herself in the mirrors of the room. She looked tall and regal, the red of her hair shining against the gold of her dress, her golden lioness half-mask pushed up on top of her head (most likely utterly ruining her coiffure, but it was awfully hard to see out of and needs must) and the heavy rubies she’d found in the vaults below the castle glowing with warmth around her neck.

She was, from head to toe, completely draped in the colours and roaring lions of her new House, declaring to all and sundry that she, Sansa Lannister, was the rightful lady of Casterly Rock. Her husband had been dressed in the colours of her birth House, black and greys, with a snarling direwolf mask of his own. He honoured her family even as she took his name and symbolism for herself.

Her costume clashed decidedly with the workaday grey uniform and white cloak of the magistrates of King’s Landing. 

“Oh, really, Ser Barristan,” Sansa said. “We are in the middle of a ball. Can’t this wait?”

“It cannot,” he snapped, stalking towards her with the folds of his robe hissing against the parquet floor. “When you gave your testimony to me, you neglected to mention that you were affianced to the Duke of Casterly.”

Sansa flicked a long curl back behind her shoulder, refusing to let the mask of a duchess slip. “I wasn’t. Not then.”

“Is this the way the duke repays you for your perjury?” Despite herself, Sansa felt a frisson of unease. The way Ser Barristan was stalking around the room and leaning over her was decidedly sinister. _Didn’t Tyrion say Ser Barristan was the magistrate who had looked into his parents’ deaths? He’d know about the manchineel, and no servant would stop a magistrate from entering Casterly Rock...he could be behind Shae’s death, and trying to frame Tyrion!_ “Is a coronet sufficient to pervert the course of justice?”

“Justice?” _That’s rich, coming from you!_ Sansa’s suspicions on the motives of Ser Barristan consolidated into rage. “Is it _just_ to hound an innocent man? Is it _just_ to condemn someone based on mere rumour and speculation? Is it _just_ to judge someone on something that happened when they were but a child? I don’t call that justice, Ser Barristan. I call that _laziness_.”

Ser Barristan fingered the jangling chain hanging around his waist. “You’re not going to make this easy, are you?”

“If by easy, you mean I will tell you what you want to hear, then no. I will not make this easy.” If Ser Barristan thought Sansa Lannister was an easily intimidated slip of a girl, she’d show him. She raised her chin imperiously. “If you had bothered to do your job, you would know that the woman in question was known to both Ser Jaime and Prince Viserys — and have you questioned either of them? No, you haven’t, have you? Rather you clung to the notion that my husband had to have been the one to commit this crime, based on nothing more than the circumstances of his birth!”

If Ser Barristan was taken aback by the names Sansa offered, he recovered himself quickly. “There’s no need for you to continue your act with me, Lady Sansa.”

“That’s Lady Lannister to you, and it’s not an act. I love my husband. The duke is the best and kindest of men and I would count myself fortunate to be his bride under any circumstances. I would count myself fortunate if this entire castle was little more than a hovel and my husband a mere tenant on someone else’s estate. I would count myself fortunate if he were one of those annoying dancers with the bells and the little bits of cloth. I would count myself fortunate even were he to be allergic to lemons, and fascinated by chickens!”

Ser Barristan looked unimpressed at that final pronouncement, which Sansa could not fathom at all. Chickens were horrid, and a husband who couldn’t enjoy lemon cakes? It was the worst possible marriage Sansa could imagine, outside of marriage to Prince Viserys. Or to one of her own brothers.

“You are determined to maintain this ruse, aren’t you?”

“How many times do I have to tell you, it is no ruse! My duke is no murderer.”

“The desire for a coronet has robbed you of your sense, girl. What would you say if I told you that madness ran in the duke’s blood? What would you say if I told you that the man was a danger to himself and to society?”

“I would tell you to look in a mirror when making those claims,” Sansa said coldly.

That stopped him in his tracks. “You think I-? You believe that I am —?”

“Deranged?” Sansa enquired politely. “Yes, I rather think you are. Delusional. Consumed by your own fancies.”

“Lady Sansa, the duke is a doomed creature. The late duchess killed her husband in cold blood, and her son inherited her lust for blood. You can see it in his eyes.”

Sansa thought her husband’s eyes were rather striking and kind, and she was terribly fond of them. What the magistrate was saying was preposterous, and she made to leave. “The duke’s mother was murdered alongside her husband, which you would have known had you bothered to do any actual investigating.”

“Is that what he told you?” said Ser Barristan, placing a restraining hand on her arm. “Lies, Lady Sansa, all lies. The truth is that madness runs in that line, madness, and a lust for blood so strong, so dangerous, that the duke’s own family has found it necessary to keep him in restraints for the last decade here in his own castle! Only shackles, Lady Sansa, have kept the duke from enacting his dread fantasies.”

Sansa pulled her arm from his grip, appalled. “He hasn’t been in shackles, he’s been in Essos. And for heaven’s sake, the duke and I are married — I’m not Lady Sansa anymore. I am Lady Lannister.”

“Are you so sure? I have it on the most reliable authority that the duke has spent the last decade in strict confinement. And given his lack of mental stability, it is doubtful that any vows he has made to you are legally binding. The mad cannot consent to marriage, Lady Sansa.”

Sansa was aghast. “Reliable authority? What reliable authority? Your story is preposterous!” Movement outside the window caught her eye. _That’s not right,_ she thought. _No one should be out there…_

Ser Barristan looked shifty. “My sources are a matter of strict confidentiality.”

“Your sources are nothing more than slander and lies. Good evening, Ser Barristan. Kindly see yourself out at once.”

* * *

The ballroom was crowded, but one shining head of hair stood out above the crowd, and Sansa worked her way through the crowd until she was close enough to see who Miss Tarth was talking to. It was Ser Jaime, who looked as serious as Sansa had ever seen him, their heads tucked close together in conversation.

“She made me! I never wanted to. All I wanted was —” one of them said, frustration evident in their tone, and Sansa didn’t have time to enquire what a dowdy chaperone and a playboy lordling could possibly have to say to each other.

“Excuse me,” chirped Sansa. Both twisted to stare at her with identical expressions of indignation. “So sorry! I really wouldn’t have interrupted if it wasn’t entirely necessary. Have you seen the duke?”

Ser Jaime regarded her with equal parts confusion and hostility while Miss Tarth slowly faded into the crowd.

Sansa tried again. “Your cousin? My husband?”

Jaime shrugged. “Last I saw, he was chatting with Viserys.”

“Viserys. Right.” Sansa raised herself on her toes to try and spot the Prince.

“He was over by the refreshment table,” pointed Jaime helpfully, then headed in the opposite direction.

Prince Viserys was indeed standing at the refreshment table, suspiciously close to the punch. Sansa made a mental note to ask Dabney to replace the punch at once — who knew what the creep had done to it.

“Sansa!” her mother’s voice filled her ears and her familiar perfume filled Sansa’s nose, cutting through the scents of the crowded ballroom. “Why, we’ve had no chance at all to catch up!”

“Mama!” smiled Sansa. “I’m sorry, yes, we really must, but I am looking for Tyrion. Have you seen him?”

“Misplaced your husband already, poppet?” her father asked, leaning on his cane.

“Just temporarily,” she smiled tightly. “But it is really rather urgent that I find him. There’s an issue with...the flowers.”

“The flowers?” her father sounded sceptical.

“And the ale? I’m still not sure where everything is, you see…”

“Well, I saw him heading outside,” said Lady Stark. “Not sure what on earth he’s doing outside when the party is in here, but perhaps he wanted some air.”

“I think he was making for the folly,” said her father helpfully.

_The folly. He told me something about the folly, back when we were —_ Sansa blanched, and quickly made for the door.

* * *

There were lights blazing in the folly.

Fear quickened Tyrion’s pace as mist rose from the ground, creating an odd reddish haze before him. Ahead of him, the folly loomed, curiously insubstantial in the mist. It flickered in front of him, the light playing tricks on him, showing itself at once how it was and how it had been, by day then rather than by night as it was now. Sunlight showing to good effect the mock aged stone, the fallen teacups and crumpled linen and his father’s wig lying abandoned on the floor.

Tyrion wrenched himself back to the present. He might not have been able to save his parents, but he’d be damned if he’d let anything happen to Sansa. The mere thought of her lying still on the ground, her fingers ever frozen in the act of clawing at her neck as the manchineel choked her to death…

He broke into a run, cursing the shortness of his legs.

A heavy brocade curtain, now in faded tatters, hung from the arch of the folly. The long strips of decaying fabric floated eerily in the breeze, creating the illusion of movement. The floating fabric reached out to him, stretching towards him like a pair of pleading arms, as Sansa had stretched her arms towards him in bed this past night…

Tyrion barreled through the curtain, stopping short as the light of a dozen candelabras assaulted his eyes.

She wasn’t there.

The only sound in the folly was his own hurried breathing, painfully loud, and the distant crash of the ocean upon the rocks of the shore. He attempted to quiet his breathing, but felt it leave his body with a whoosh when his eyes grew accustomed to the light and he saw the folly anew.

Someone had refilled the pool.

The candlelight danced off the clear water, making the little room as bright as day. The furniture had been replaced, replaced with exact copies of the red-and-cream-striped settee and chairs that had been here twelve years before. They showed none of the wear he would have expected after ten years sitting out in the elements.

Sansa might not have been here, but someone had been. Someone who had been here before, on that fateful day. There was a sumptuous repast set out on a low table between two nymphs, just as one had been set out that day. Green grapes glistened in perfect clusters on silver platters while peaches, apricots and pears all spilled from a cornucopia in a show of bounty. There were pastries laden with smooth-whipped custards and berries fresh from the hothouse, and, in the center of it all, an apple, cut into quarters and arranged on a delicate porcelain plate, a paring knife beside it, the mother-of-pearl handle glimmering in the candlelight and the juice of the apple gleaming on it’s blade.

The apple sent a chill down Tyrion’s spine. 

The death apple. That’s what they called the fruit of the manchineel tree. One bite. That was all it took. One bite, and then a horrible, lingering death.

Despite himself, Tyrion let himself entertain a furtive, fugitive trickle of hope. None of the apple appeared to be missing. The apple may just be an apple. Had he arrived in time? Would he be able to stop the murder of his wife in the way he hadn’t been able to stop the murder of his parents?

“Sansa?” Tyrion called, hope bursting through his chest and cracking his voice.

He never expected someone else to answer.

“She’ll be along shortly.” A tall figure brushed aside the drapes and stepped into the folly.

“You!”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Who do you think it is?


	14. The Death Apple

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sansa didn’t stop to see who had shot, nor where the ball went. She threw herself to the floor with a cry.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Some lines from S01E07 ‘You Win or You Die’.

A woman stepped through the arch, the tattered drapery catching on the shoulders of her gown and the golden laurel crown that circled her brow. Cersei brushed the strips aside. “I really must remember to replace that curtain.”

“Cersei?” Relief warred with confusion. “What are you doing here? Where’s Sansa?”

His cousin cocked her head, smiling a pretty little smile. “Oh, she’ll be along soon enough. I should have left you two to enjoy your surprise, but I couldn’t resist coming along to see how you liked it!”

“Our surprise?”

“Your betrothal feast,” said Cersei easily, nudging one of the platters of food into a slightly better position. “I know this homecoming hasn’t been without its difficulties. You’d been away for so long, and then this marriage happened all so quickly — I wanted to give you two some time away from the throng,” she said as she reached into an ice bucket adorned with roaring lions and retrieved a bottle of champagne. 

“How very kind of you,” said Tyrion. “There was a note…”

“I hope you didn’t mind the mystery,” Cersei said. “I thought it would be a fun surprise.”

She handed the bottle to Tyrion, and he opened it on instinct, the bubbling liquid splashing on the floor and staining a carpet.

“Oh, no, you shouldn’t have done that,” Cersei said. “It’s all ruined now.”

“Cersei? What?”

Cersei handed Tyrion a glass. “Go on, drink up.”

Tyrion filled the glass, then paused. “I’ll just wait for Sansa,” he said as he put the bottle down on the table. There was an acid taste at the back of his throat and he didn’t think champagne would wash it away. “I wouldn’t want to spoil the...surprise.”

“It’s not like you to turn down wine! I’m sure Sansa won’t mind you starting without her. Go on,” Cersei urged.

Tyrion raised the glass to his lips, and saw triumph flash in his cousin’s eyes. “I’ve never much liked champagne,” Tyrion lied, stalling for time. “I’ve always preferred brandy. You have it, Cersei. As a reward for setting this wonderful surprise up.”

“Oh, no,” said Cersei. Her smile seemed fixed and frozen as she swayed closer to Tyrion. “This is yours. You’re the duke. You deserve it.”

“Don’t drink that!” A voice rang out behind them. “It’s poisoned.”

Tyrion whirled, more champagne spilling onto the carpet beneath him, and he heard Cersei hiss. “Sansa!” he cried. “Thank the gods you’re all right.”

“At the moment, I’m more worried about you. Drop the glass, my love.”

He put the glass down on the table instead, and stepped towards Sansa. With a cry, Cersei snatched up the paring knife Tyrion had seen beside the apple and held it to his throat, her other hand gripping his hair tight.

“Come one step closer and I’ll slit his throat,” she said, completely calmly.

* * *

Sansa raised her hands in a placating gesture, wondering how on earth she was going to get them out of this situation. The knife was little but sharp, and it’s blade gleamed oddly. Sansa saw the sliced fruit on the table — the same fruit she’d seen hanging in Joanna Lannister’s workroom — and realised the blade was likely coated in the apple’s juice.

“Was it you, ten years ago?” Sansa asked. “Cersei, why? You would have been a child!”

“I was old enough to know the shame of having _this_ in the family,” Cersei said, twisting his hair and making Tyrion rise onto his toes with a gasp of pain. “The future Duke of Casterly. What a joke. You should have been drowned at birth, then I would have been the duchess.”

Sansa was confused. “No, Jaime would have been the duke.”

Tyrion made a noise that Sansa loosely interpreted as ‘why are you arguing with the woman holding a poisoned knife to my neck,’ but Cersei responded smugly.

“And I would have been his duchess.”

“But he’s your brother!”

Cersei smiled, a mad, gloating thing. “The Targaryens wed brother and sister together for three hundred years to keep the bloodline pure. Jaime and I are more than brother and sister. We shared a womb, came into this world together — we belong together. And no one tells a duke what to do. We would have been untouchable. We just had to get this freak and his parents out of the way. They were ruining us. They had to be cut out, like a disease, so the family could remain strong. Jaime wouldn’t do it — he’s always been too soft, too good. Instead I did it. I was a fierce lioness, defending her family. I befriended my aunt, learnt all about her plants — and poisoned the bitch. It wasn’t hard. No one expected it from little Cersei Lannister, all golden curls and gentle smiles. And then this freak ran away before I could do the same to him, but no matter. He came back, and I figured his time had come. But then you.”

Cersei lifted the knife from Tyrion’s neck and waved it in Sansa’s direction.

“You came along, you little whore. So desperate to get your hands on a title you’d stoop to sleeping with this freak, ensnaring him with your cunt. It was Joanna all over again, and you wouldn’t take a hint. You wouldn’t leave, you wouldn’t run back to your pathetic family in the North like you were supposed to...so you’ll have to die as well. Drink the champagne, Sansa. Drink the champagne or I’ll kill Tyrion and tell everyone you did it. Everyone already believes me over you, the daughter of a disgraced duke. And why shouldn’t they? I’m Cersei Lannister. I’m beyond reproach.”

“You’re Cersei Lannister, and you’re guilty of murder,” said a man in his soft Northern burr.

Sansa turned to see her father step through the hanging curtains, a very serviceable pistol held firm in his grip while his cane supported him with his other hand. Ser Barristan entered on the other side, also pointing a pistol at Cersei, who flicked her eyes from one to the other with consternation.

Sansa took the opportunity and lunged, pulling Tyrion from Cersei’s grip and to safety beside her.

“Was that enough of a confession for you, Ser Barristan?” Lord Stark enquired, and the magistrate nodded.

“Quite enough to earn her a place in Bedlam, if not the executioner’s axe.”

“You can’t kill me! I’m Cersei Lannister! The Duchess of Casterly Rock!”

“You’re under arrest, that’s what you are,” insisted Lord Stark, stepping closer. “Put down the knife, and come along quietly. No need to make a scene. Not at a ball.”

“You Starks! You ruin everything!” Cersei shrieked, and threw herself towards Sansa.

There was an explosion that filled the room with acrid black smoke, and Sansa didn’t stop to see who had shot, nor where the ball went. She threw herself to the floor with a cry.

* * *

“She confessed to everything in front of a judge last night,” Ser Barristan reported, standing stiffly as the Lannisters and Starks broke their fast together the next morning. “We questioned the rest of the family last night. Lady Dorna apparently had had her suspicions, but hadn’t wanted to believe them, and hadn’t done anything other than deliberately look the other way when Lady Cersei said she wanted to visit Casterly Rock in the middle of her season. Neither Lord Kevan nor Master Jaime had any knowledge of what Cersei had done, apparently. I am convinced of their innocence. Lady Cersei apparently involved another cousin, one Lancel Lannister, to help with the murder Miss Shae Kekilli. Upon questioning, Mr. Lannister confessed that Cersei and he had been involved, and that he murdered the young woman to prove his love to Cersei. Lady Cersei will be transported to King’s Landing later today, where she will stand trial for the murder of her aunt and uncle, the attempted murder of Lord Tyrion, and for being an accomplice to the murder of Miss Kekilli.”

“I just hope she gets the help she needs,” said Lady Stark. “The poor girl.”

“That poor girl tried to murder us, and put about rumours that my husband had been locked in an attic as a ravening monster for the last decade,” said Sansa sharply. “I’m sorry Mama, but there is no pity in me for Cersei Lannister. May she get what she deserves. Speaking of which —” Sansa turned to Ser Barristan. “I believe you owe us an apology?”

Impossibly, Ser Barristan stiffened even more. “You are correct, Lady Lannister,” he said through gritted teeth. “I apologise for my conduct in this case, and for how I spoke to you last night.”

The magistrate left not long after that, and Tyrion looked around curiously. “Where is Jaime? It’s not like him to miss breakfast.”

Dabney the butler stepped forward with a cough, and offered Tyrion a note on a silver tray.

Tyrion took it, broke the seal, and quickly scanned it’s contents before breaking into peals of laughter. He handed the note to Sansa and when she read its contents, she was hard pressed not to laugh herself.

“Well?” her father asked curiously.

Sansa smiled. “It is well that I am a married woman now, because I am without a chaperone,” she said. “Ser Jaime and Miss Tarth have eloped together to Essos, it seems. They left last night once Ser Barristan cleared Jaime of his involvement in the murders, not wanting to go through the ordeal of the trial. They will write when they are settled, apparently, and ask our forgiveness for taking a few valuables to sell to help purchase their passage.”

“I’ve gone from two cousins to none,” Tyrion wheezed, causing Lord and Lady Stark to look at him with concern.

“Fortunately, I have several siblings,” Sansa said, squeezing his hand. “And you have me, of course.”

He smiled at her. “You are worth all the cousins in the world, my love,” he said. “And I look forward to meeting the rest of your family.”

A footman slipped into the room and whispered something to Dabney, who left the room with alacrity. Sansa raised her eyebrows at this, but then turned back to the conversation, trying to stop her mother from embarrassing Sansa with too many stories of her childhood.

Tyrion was no help, urging her on with innocent-seeming questions, and Sansa determined to write to his aunt in Essos as soon as possible to try and learn some mildly mortifying stories of her husband’s decade in her care to try and balance the scales slightly. 

“My lords, my ladies,” coughed Dabney from the door. “May I present Mr. and Mrs. Gendry Waters? I believe they are some relation of yours.”

“Arya!” cried Sansa and Lady Stark together, both rushing to envelope their missing family member in tight hugs, while Lord Stark raised his cup of tea to Tyrion in salute.

“Welcome to the family, Tyrion.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for coming on my Regency adventure with me! I've started work on a new Sansa/Tyrion verse, this one a Modern AU and very kinky. Please come and check out [The Best of All](https://archiveofourown.org/series/1707985) for more Sansa/Tyrion adventures!


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